Maxim V. Karpov — Thu, 30 Dec 2004 17:14:00 GMT

I agree NetGear is better then Linksys. I used to have Linksys "B" network at my home office and was disappointed that I had to buy booster for the signal. Overall style,quality and support I think is better too!

Maxim

[www.ipattern.com do you?]

David Totzke — Thu, 30 Dec 2004 22:17:00 GMT

My first router at home was/is a NetGear 314. It worked right out of the box. The only complaint that I would have about this unit would be configuring the firewall filters. I wanted to let FTP and HTTP through to a specific machine on my home network. Setting up the virtaul server port mappings was straight forward enough but it still didn't work. I then realized that I would have to reconfigure the firewall filter sets.

At one point, I managed to coax the router into dropping all incoming traffic originating on the LAN! Yikes! I had to go out and buy a serial cable and connect to the darn thing with Hyper Terminal. Good thing I'm such a huge geek.

I recently bought an SMC wireless unit that was on sale at Future Shop. It works decently enough and configuration is very simple throught he web interface. Something the NetGear unit is laccking. The only issue with the SMC unit is that when using Remote Desktop or the Citrix ICA client to access remote machines, the SMC unit suffers from horrible lag spikes. I've been able to type two or three complete sentences in Word before the sceen suddenly catches up. At first I thought it was just the wireless interface but switching to a hard connection leaves me with the same problem. The lag spikes come at regular intervals and eventually the remote connection just drops.

Switching my network back to the NetGear unit makes the problem go away completely. I've loved this unit from the day I bought it and that was more than a couple years ago when they cost you over a hundred bucks.

Happy Holidays!

dave

802.11g Rocks!