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Netgear Wireless 54G Cable/DSL Router
Netgear (
12 August, 2003 )
Electronics |
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£
62.04 |
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subject to change. |
usually dispatched within 24 hours. |
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It is fantastic!  |
This really is one great bit of kit. I have a desktop, laptop and NTL broadband. The router allows 4 wired network connections so I didnt have to buy a wireless card for my desktop. Setup was Plug and Play and instantly gave me a home network and configurable firewall.I bought a Netgear Wireless 54G PCMCIA Adapter for my laptop and that was also very straight forward. I get 100% signal strength all over the house. If youre tempted then go for it.
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Does the job well, set-up can be fiddly  |
I bought this router to use with BT ADSL broadband and Netgears DM602 ADSL modem/router. Id read how this configuration (DM602/WGR614) could be tricky and that it would be necessary to define a gateway in the DMZ etc. However, the initial set-up couldnt have been easier.Id been using the DM602 in router mode to connect "by wire" and I left it exactly the way it was. I changed the admin IP address of the WGR614 so that it didnt match the DM602, rebooted the WGR614 and then ran the wizard. Lo and behold, I was connected inside of 10 minutes. The fiddly bit was getting the wireless encryption to work but that may have been pilot error. When in doubt, reboot everything and renew the TCP/IP connections via IPConfig. Initially, the wireless connection would drop and reconnect every 10 minutes. This turned out to be a Windows XP feature - XP searches for available wireless networks every 10 minutes and for some reason drops the current network and then reconnects after the search(!) Configuring the WGR614 to NOT broadcast the SSID fixed this and the connection is now rock-solid - it hasnt dropped once in a week. My Linksys wireless PCMCIA card easily keeps up with the 512kbs broadband speeds even though its only 802.11b compatible. I recommend this DM602/WGR614 combo for easily installing a wireless network on BT ADSL in the UK.
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Excellent firewall |
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This firewall is a piece of cake to setup. Althought it has a wireless feature, it can be used as a wired firewall solution. This allows it to be perfect to slowly migrate to a wireless solution. It even allows both to be used at the same time. Make sure you know which version you get. There are 4 versions of the WGR614 names v1, v2, v3 and v4 (funnily enough). v1 doesnt support WPA except through a beta firmware upgrade. v2 to v4 does. The setup screens are easy to use as it always contains help information along the side to explain all the options on the current screen you are looking at. This is money well spent.
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