Networking Reviews

I used this hub to attach a usb printer, cd-rw drive, and diskette drive to my new iBook, which had only one usb port. Everything worked well, the color of the hub matched the iBook, and the hub itself was unobtrusive on my desk.

The USB pocket hub is an interesting kinda "halfway" device. It's really meant for use with PowerBooks (and, though the product information listed here doesn't say so, Windows-based notebooks as well), but connecting more devices to the hub makes a PowerBook inherently less portable. I'm not sure how much of a market there really is for a portable USB hub, but if there is one, this device is about as portable as you can get. You can easily slip it into your pocket if you need to go a-wanderin'. And it can be powered by the included, not-so-lightweight AC adapter if you need to connect more power hungry devices, like scanners and printers.

Still, I can't help thinking that it will be bought more by desktop owners than PowerBook fans, simply because hubs are by their nature more suited for use with bigger, more 'anchored' machines. To that extent, it's an elegant addition, because the included color sleeves make it possible to match with most colors of machine. The drawback is if you have a LOT of USB devices to attach. It's not really meant to be stackable, and you might find it awkward to have more than two of these attached to your machine. But I'd say if you have less than 9 devices, this is a graceful, fully-functional way to go.

First, as of the time I write this (6/6/2004), Amazon has this mislabeled as "Brother Intl NC2100P - NETWORK CARD (NC2100P)." This is not a network card, it's a print server - if the title has changed by the time you read this, it shows Amazon actually reads and reacts to the reviews. (I'm not holding my breath.) The print server is about the size of a wireless phone. You connect it directly to the parallel port of your Brother printer (no cable required), plug in the power supply, and connect the ethernet port to your router. Then, manipulate the LAN settings on your router and on the server in mysterious ways, and presto, you have a network printer.

It works great - it's given me no problems. The documentation is not that good - if you're a complete beginner at networking, you're going to need someone's help to get this configured properly. And it costs more than print servers offered by NetGear, LinkSys, etc. - but this one works with my Brother printer, and the other print servers I looked at were not guaranteed to. So I was willing to shell out the extra cash to make sure I had compatibility, and I'm happy I did.

This card is great. It runs everything I need it to including, the wake on LAN and the speed is great I recomend this card to anyone with a desire to get a great card at a great price.

This is a nice 'little' USB hub at a very reasonable price. If your looking to network a few computers together this is a good choice. It is only a 3 port hub so you don't have to much expandabilty so you you need to consider this before you buy it. For my purposes the hub was useful and easy to install. Overall I recommend this hub.

I purchased this 8 port gigabit switch to do parallel computing. The setup is easy and it works reliably. The only thing I dislike is the noise made by its cooling fan. It is a little bit too noisy

That's right. This is the only router/4pt switch in it's class that has a 10/100 WAN port. Netgear, Linksys, Belkin, etc. are all 10baseT WAN. The NAT for port forwarding for an FTP site actually works! Haven't tried it too much with anything else. For games that use a LOT of ports like Mechwarrior 4, you need to jump into the DMZ. But I know Netgear and Linksys users that have to put their FTP servers in the DMZ. Down side is that only 16 TCP or UDP ports can be forwarded, where I think Netgear's funny looking new silver one (what was so wrong with square blue metal? You could set that on it's edge WITHOUT the silly stand) does 20, but NONE of them allow you to enter, say, a range of 100 ports for subsequent connections in games. For that I guess you need a REAL router like a Cisco and a lot more money. The best part is the price. With Super Saver shipping to Hawaii, I got WAY over on the usual "Pony Express" charge-by-weight price gouging, as well as the local merchant price gouging,(as if they really pay individual shipping rates on bulk products)if they even carry a selection. This router is cheaper than the competitors and better in most areas, although ALL these companies could still do a better job with NAT reliability, command line interfaces and port range capability. The CPU is an ARM 7 125Mhz with an 8MB Cache. You won't find these specs anywhere, though. I had to dig. Why are these companies so tight-lipped about # of ports you can forward and proc/cache specs? Well, cuz they want to sell volume and most folks don't even know what this stuff means. None of the companies are interested in establishing any standard of baseline comparison, because they'd rather market by taking up space on the store shelf like beer companies do. This little router does have nice bright green LED's on the front for each speed, which makes monitoring traffic easy. Small, light and stackable with OTHER rectangular components besides Hawking products, unlike Linksys and (newest)Netgear. This black router just looks more professional to me than a lot of the other funky-colored home-user market niche types. Don't know too much about it's electrical durability yet, but after all the Linksys products (hubs, mostly) that I've seen get fried by power spikes, I steered clear. Bottom line is that this router is yet another sleeper computer/networking product that most folks in the market for a router will overlook.

This little hub is ok for most home networking situations. The metal case is a nice feature and much more durable than most of the cheap plastic cases on the market today. If you just need something to file and print share on a peer-to-peer at home, this is a pretty good choice.

It really works great. Easy installable and works simply fine.

It works great! It was easy to setup and I've had no problems with it at all. It supports both USB 2.0 and 1.1 at a cheap price. I would recommend it to anyone in need of a USB hub.