Networking Reviews

This product didn't work for me. It refuses to communicate with my Linksys 802.11g Access Point/Router box. According to press reports other people have seen the same problem and the Netgear firmware in the WGE101 box seems to be at fault. What's odd is a Netgear 802.11g USB adapter works fine with the Linksys access point.

The Netgear bridge did work with the Netgear WGR614 access point, but I had to stop using the Netgear access point because it locked up every few days for some unknown reason.

Given my experiences with the WGE101 and WGR614 boxes, I think Netgear isn't up to speed yet on 802.11g technology.

I already own the WGT 624 that goes b/g/super-g, and my laptop was just b, but I bought for the future when I got a g-bridge (mainly for my xbox).

With the router setup as b and g, I got throughput speeds of 2.5 megabytes a second from a different floor of the house from bridge to router, which is about 20Mbps.

I've always bought netgear products and I like the whole slick-silver design, and the ability to stack the units on top of each other. I already own the FS608 and could stack the bridge ontop of that.

My only problems with the router was how to add it to the access list. I figured out that you do NOT add the bridge's mac address, but instead any device that connects through the bridge to the router... so if you have 15 computers being bridged to the router, you have to add all 15 mac addresses to the router... that sounds like somewhat of a pain, but if you think about it, your network is that much more secure...

The reason I say that is, suppose you had a bridge connecting to an accesspoint to further spread signals within your network... well by having to add every mac address that goes through the bridge, you are individually authorizing everyone, instead of just allowing the bridge itself.

Anyways... I feel it's a good product and will continue to buy from netgear.

I just picked up the WGE101 from zoomfly.com, it works great. DIdn't have a difficult time setting it up, everything went smoothly.

Buy another camcorder! This one will be a waste of your time and money. On paper this camcorder is great. However, not only is it overpriced and full of extraneous features. It is also difficult to use, has a poorly written manual and horrible support. I tried the SONY product support line at 888-449-7669 twice, but got little help.

Additionally, writing to the memory stick produces poor quality images, and there is no built in video light. Finally, the PC software that comes with the camera leaves much to be desired.

My excitement about buying this camera and all its accesories has been replaced with utter contempt for SONY. I now understand why the company has been having so many problems.

What a camera indeed. I just got it three days ago and after reading the manual I see there will be a lot of learning ahead for me. There are so many features this camera has I know I will not use most of them. The video is sharp and the photos are better then expected (acceptable but I will still use my digital camera when needed or preferred). The supplied 8 MB memory stick is only worth a tease, you will have to get at least a 128 MB or greater! Being in the Air Force and stationed in Germany this will be one treat to carry along on up coming trips!

I am technically competent, but a novice at video photography. Therefore, I spent weeks reviewing a a number of various cameras. I ultimately decided on the TRV 80 because of: the HAD technology, the 3 1/2 touch screen, the digital still, the still pop-up flash, along with the features rich capabilities of this camera. I have used it for about a week and have found it to be very easy to use. The controls are intuitive and the manual has been very easy to navigate. You should also consider the need for various accessoriies. I purchased it with a bundled package which included: tripod, 2 additional batteries, wide and telephoto lenses, case, tapes, cleaning kit, USB card reader, and a four year MAC parts and labor warranty. Add on package was less about two hundred seventy dollars and well worth it. Also spent a long time looking for editing software with good reviews. Settled on PYRO Digital Video, which indluded a 1394 PCI card and software compatable with the Sony camera. They have beginner, intermediate and Pro versions available. So far I am extremely pleased with the camera, and accessory packages. I am able to take great videos now and when I master the advanced features I'm sure the quality of the movies produced will improve. Highly recommend this product and suggest you consider the add on packages, especially the 4 year warranty.

The good about this card: It sounds great and has nice inputs.

The bad about this card: It constantly crashes my Windows XP Pro box. After much searching I found that Creative has problems with Hyper Threaded or Multi-Processor systems. If you have one AVOID THIS CARD LIKE THE PLAGUE. Creative's idea?? Disable Hyper Threading. My idea?? Buy a different brand of sound card!

After using an old Creative SB Live! Value (The original, not the 5.1) for several years, I finally upgraded, and I must say I'm seriously impressed. As the other reviewers have said, Creative has horrible tech support, as was evident when I upgraded to XP with my previous card. This one, however, went in flawlessly. To anyone buying this who isn't a complete geek such as myself, I have a few pointers... 1) Uninstall your previous card first (Go to device manager, right-click on it, and pick Uninstall). 2) Take a good look at the directions, because there are several cables to hook up to both the card and the Platinum drive. 3) If you're using older (Analog/cheap) speakers, plug them into "Line 1", not the main speaker jack. And 4) When you turn the computer on after installing the card, put that install CD in right away, because otherwise windows bugs you about the locations of a few files during the PnP setup.

Anyway, enjoy. This is a great product... The kind of quality I've come to expect from Creative. Huzzah!

the review belowtitled "format" has been placed by a crank who has written the same review for EVERY creative labs product. cleasrly they don't know what they were doing, installed the card or software wrong and now have a grudge.

SMCs 2670 bridge will configure ok if you use an SMC wireless router. Any attempt to use DHCP in any different way fails. Unfortunately, my attempt at using this with my ReplayTV with ethernet jack failed miserably. Get a D-Link or Linksys. SMC might have an improved version out by now, but stay away from this one!

It's not immediately obvious that this device works only in 802.11b infrastructure mode. If you not using an access point, and are using 802.11b ad-hoc (peer-to-peer) mode, this device is useless.

You might also want to look at the Linksys WET11, which is very reliable and does not suffer this limitation.

I bought this device about a year ago to hook up my TiVo to my wireless network. I had an SMC wireless router, so it seemed a logical fit. The performance was just "OK", but nothing to rave about.

A month ago, I upgraded my router to a Linksys WRT54G v2 router, and the change was amazing and immediate. All performance issues have vanished and were (obviously) due to the router signal and not the SMC2670W. Very happy now.

The only downside is with firmware upgrades... you (I) can't upgrade wirelessly so I was forced to remove the device (from TiVo) and upgrade it via a cross-connect cable attached to my host PC. This is no small feat, mind you, since the SMC2670W power supply is connected behind my entertainment center. SMC has not supplied a new FW update in a while, so hopefully this will not be an issue again.

By Netgear's own admission, this card is not fully PCI compliant because it is unwilling to share an IRQ. This works with Windows 9x if you know how to tell Windows to not share IRQ's with this card. You will also need to manually change one of the driver settings from "Auto" to "Fully Asychronous" to achieve full speed.

This card will not work at all with the Windows 2K/XP hardware abstraction layer (HAL) because the new HAL does not permit overriding IRQ settings. Therefore, the most you will get out of this card with IRQ sharing is about 100 bps (far from the rated 100,000,000 bps). You might as well use your old RS-232 port.

I had to throw all of my and my companies cards out.

After 6 month operating the FA312 card, the card suddenly burned and the system won't power-up until i removed it. After calling the technical support, the response that i get is that Netgear's warranty doesn't cover a card that gets burned. Even though I and an UPS and tried to install it on different system and different motherboard, the tech support kept asking for more, like "go to your neighbor and install it in his system". Like who would let you install a card that can mess-up their system.

My best advice is to STAY AWAY FROM NETGEAR AND THEIR "WARRANTY" that doesn't cover anything.

it's a good card. Sure, I much prefer either an Intel 10/100 Pro+ or 3COM 3C905 card... but for $20ish it'a a good deal. NetGear makes good stuff.. I'm especially pleased with their FVS318 internet gateway router.. Don't even think of buying anything other than a NetGear router.. unless you want to step up and buy a REAL POWERHOUSE from NetScreen.

(some people, like another reviewer above WILL have problems WHEN they MISHANDLE their cards. These cards, much as other gear are not static-proof.. and don't like to have their contact's handled..)

if you are a responsible user this card will serve you well

I recently purchase this item, I found that there is no Firewall Administration Options in the menu as showed in the DLink Product Page Manual (Everything else is good). I'm talking with the Dlink support and have no solution. DLink support team says "There are no firewall options on this router. To open ports on these routers you will use vserver and applications. Thank you for networking with D-Link. "

All the features work well and are a breeze to setup, except one. This router does all the things you would expect it to in a very stable manner, except one. If you check the D-Link Web site for the manual of this exact router model. You will find some rather nice firewall features (My whole reason for getting this router actually). When you set up the router, you will find that there is no firewall button. It absolutely does not exist. The manual has an actual screen shot of the setup screen with a firewall button in plain view and it details how to use the firewall, but the product came with no such option. I am very disappointed, and feel very mislead.

Not much surprise here, it doesn't support any multifunction options, but it does what it's supposed to otherwise do.

I have returned this for a USB Server by Keyspan.

It allows ANY USB device to be shared on a network (as if it were plugged direclty into any PC).

See my Amazon review.

It is the ONLY answer to multifunction sharing.

I have a 19" LCD Dell 1900FP monitor. I could not choose any better resolution level than 640x480! Beware, Xwindows crashed on the first load my Redhat 9 box. (despite editing the XF86Config file and choosing a generic monitor). It seems as that display output is not interpreted correctly by linux. I am assuming this unit works fine under Windows. I even tried my RH9 install CD's using the graphical installer and the text and images were off the screen. I eventually got the display, mouse and keyboard all working at 640x480. So unless you like HUGE images, stay away.

Overalll, I am not very impressed.

The basic KVM functions fine for me at resolutions up to
1280 x 1024 on windows and linux, and without a separate
power supply. However I have encountered two problems:

1. Each time I switch from one computer to the other, I have
to readjust the position of the image on my monitor. Hawking
has been unable to suggest any solution.

2. Like most computers, mine puts the monitor in low power mode
after a period of inactivity. The KVM interferes with this.

I don't know why that other guy had video problems - must've been a bad unit because mine looks fine whether I'm running W2K or Linux KDE.

This switch is small enough to hide and, even though it has a 9V power port, it doesn't need it.

It even passes the gold standard of KVMs: you can boot Windows past the GUI start with the switch pointed at another machine and still have mouse and keyboard function when you switch back. Try that with a manual switch.

In summary, this is a very nice piece of equipment that beats its competitors on price hands down while not giving up anything in functionality.

This unit is what it claims to be and does what it claims to be able to do. I've been using it to connect three computers to my DSL router for months now with no real problems. The reason I'm replacing it, though, is that it's just too loud. It's got an internal fan that makes a constant whining noise that seems to be getting louder as it gets older (or maybe I'm just going nuts).

All in all I'd have to say that this is an acceptable unit performance-wise, made unacceptable by one super noisy little internal fan. Believe me - when people complain about it from the next room it's noisy! If you can put up with the noise you'll get acceptable and reliable performance.

I bought one of these in May 2001, plugged it in, and it's worked great since then. I am confused by complaints from others about fan noise, because mine does not have a fan! Perhaps those were an older version? Mine is Model DSH-5, Serial BF121581001939, Version D1.

Could only get to work intermittently with an older
Dell PC and a PowerMac G4. The keyboard would rarely
work when the PC was selected. Iogear, please go back
to the drawing board!

This is a nice KVM switch, very small, with built in cables, and relatively inexpensive. For many people, this would be a very good choice.

EXCEPT if you use a mouse with extra side-buttons or if you use one or the other of the computers for gaming. It may just be because it has PS2 inputs and not enough channels for the information, but the side buttons on my mouse don't work through this switch.

Also, the keyboard and mouse signals seem to be a little rough. This doesn't really have an effect in most computer use, but when gaming, at times holding down a key won't do anything. I have to repeatedly press the key to get it to register. It's very annoying.

There doesn't seem to be any problem with video. That looks fine.

This won't work for me, but it may work fine for others. Given that most of the alternatives are twice as expensive, it could be a good choice for many.

I have a desktop and notebook that I use this product with so I can control both from my desktop monitor. The only issue I had was that I had a cordless keyboard and mouse and they didn't work very well with this product. Iogear's website says the product does not really work well with cordless keyboards and mice. After I switched to a corded keyboard and mouse it worked fine.

It does not work with WEP contradictory to the claims by Linksys and set-up instructions.

I had great difficulty setting up the unit. Even after disabling WEP and MAC filtering, configuring the unit to use WEP was annoying. Since you must setup the unit wirelessly (no ethernet connection is available) whatever wireless connection you are using to setup the unit must not be in range of any other wireless domain but your own. Whenever I tried to configure the unit using my wpc54g equiped laptop, my laptop would loose the original wireless connection to my network and connect to my neighbors wireless router instead of the wre54g. Once I got the unit configured it would work OK to extend the network, but would cause my wga54g to lockup after a few minutes, requiring a reboot of the wga54g and my XBOX. After two frustrating days I finally gave up and returned the unit. Oh well.

This is truly a "no brainer" product. It will perform exactly as advertised. My wife runs a business next to our house and the signal from our router was always poor, so I purchased this to increase the signal. The only down side to this product is that it will only work with the "g" type routers. So I had to upgrade to a WRT54g from the BEFW11s4. Note: It will work with your "b" type adapters, but your speed will be limited by your adapters. It has been my experience that Linksys works best with other Linksys, so I recommend using all Linksys for your network. The WRT54g is an excellent router, it has more features and so far is more stable than my old router. Use a laptop to locate the edge of your signal area and place the expander just with in it. It has an "auto configuration" button. Then you can use the browser utility to configure it. You will get roughly double your routers range. If you need more range buy it!