After five long years my good ol’ Linksys WRT54G wireless router decided it was time to bite the dust last week. I had been thinking about upgrading recently since the router does require a resetting once or twice a week due to dropped connections, which is annoying, but something I can deal with short term. Plus I figured it might be time to switch from a wireless G network to wireless N.
So, without doing a whole lot of research (my internet connection was down after all) I picked up the D-Link DIR-615. Setup was quick and easy on the mac. Plug and play. Connected immediately, brought up the browser setup and got everything customized and secured. I did notice that the thing hardly had any range at all without screwing in the antennas, which are sort of ugly in a 60s-sci-fi kind of way.
After about a day of use I started noticing some extreme bouts of slowdown off and on. Did some troubleshooting and couldn’t really figure out what was causing it. Resetting the router seemed to get it working properly, but after several resets in a day I was getting tired of the chore just for a working internet connection. I did a bit of research online and found that a lot of other people were reporting similar issues, and it sounds like it’s more of a glitchy hardware problem. I figured it would probably be better for me to just take it back than try to fight to get it to work. I’ve always been a techy nerd type, but anymore I find that I don’t have time for this hackery. I need something that works immediately, not something I have to piss around with for four hours.
So, I swapped the router out yesterday for the Linksys WRT160N. Which doesn’t have external antennas, but also has a weird 60s-sci-fi look to it. You could hang it on a fishing line and float it in front of a video camera is you were in need of some UFO special effects.
Had a bit more trouble with the plug-n-play on this one. It wasn’t showing an SSID for me to connect to initially to manually configure through my browser and the setup CD was Windows only. I had to fire up Anne’s PC to run the disc and get the router configured so that I could connect to it on the Mac. Would have probably been hopeless if we were a mac-only household. There’s probably some other work around out there online, but that doesn’t ever do anyone any good when you can’t get online because your router sucks.
Anyway, it’s been up and running all day and we haven’t had a lick of trouble with it yet (fingers crossed). Connectivity seems very fast, but I haven’t had a chance to run any tests on how well it will transfer between system on the internal network. I think that’s where we’re only going to see a big jump in speeds for the WirelessN network over WirelessG.
So there you go. My geek out weekend is complete. I just wanted to warn anyone contemplating a new router to avoid that D-Link model if you don’t want the potential headache.
And now, back to your regularly scheduled program.
I haven’t had much luck with D-link or Netgear routers. I have a spare Belkin that I use when traveling, but it’s another one of those routers that has to be reset every few days. I’ve had 3+ years of good luck with a Linksys WRT54G model, it’s no N but gets the job done.
N is way faster than a G router, I’m a bit jealous at the moment cause I don’t have one.
I think you will notice a speed improvement. When I use the Internet speed tests directly connected to my G router I get better results than on wireless.
I have a severe crush on this thing.
I know it is ridiculously expensive, but I can’t help but find ways to justify it.
Ha! Yeah, Time Capsules are pretty cool. I thought about getting one a few months ago, but went with a cheaper option. I already own a Mac Mini, so I hooked it up to the TV in the Living Room so that I can watch movies on it. I have 1.7TB of storage connected to the Mac Mini via Firewire & USB, which I have shared across the network and mounted as Time Machine drives for my laptop and Anne’s laptop, so they can backup automatically and wirelessly. I also set up the Screen Sharing service on both of our laptops so that we can use them as “remotes” for the Mac Mini when we want to watch videos or surf the net on the larger TV screen and not have to piddle with the tiny one-button Apple remote controls.
Overall I guess it would be a more expensive option to build from scratch, but I already had all of the hardware serving other functions.