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Owen J.

Owen J.

Joined on 03/10/05

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Most Favorable Review

Great Budget Router

On Networks N300 Wireless Router N300R
On Networks N300 Wireless Router N300R

Pros: Very good signal strength, great reliability. Setup page is easy enough to use. Low price. Out of the box, the router will redirect you to the setup page (no password) if the internet connection isn't working. Once the connection is configured, you can log in and configure anything as would would expect from a typical router. The internal antennae do a good job of sending a strong, reliable signal. I tried connecting about 7 different things to it (including the famously bad ps3 wireless) and didn't have any compatibility issues or dropped connections. There are lots of advanced options you can configure. It appears you can load your own firmware on it.

Cons: The initial setup doesn't ask you for a name or password, but you can easily set it later. I didn't find the default user or password for the setup page in the quick start guide. It's admin, admin. I doesn't have gigabit.

Overall Review: I get 100% signal in my whole house. I have a smaller house with concrete/plaster walls. If you don't have any cordless phone or similar devices, turn off 20/40Mhz Coexistence in the advanced tab, and you will get much better performance. If your dsl/cable already has a NAT, you can turn of the routing bits and just use it as a switch/access point.

Most Critical Review

Wouldn't Recommend It.

Rosewill RNX-N600PCE - Dual Band Wireless N600 Wi-Fi Adapter - IEEE 802.11b / 11g / 11n, Up to 300 Mbps (5.0 GHz) + 300 Mbps (2.4 GHz) Data Rates, PCI E Interface, 2 High Power Dual Band Antennas
Rosewill RNX-N600PCE - Dual Band Wireless N600 Wi-Fi Adapter - IEEE 802.11b / 11g / 11n, Up to 300 Mbps (5.0 GHz) + 300 Mbps (2.4 GHz) Data Rates, PCI E Interface, 2 High Power Dual Band Antennas

Pros: It does bring wireless internet to your desktop. It's PCI-E 1x. Low Profile.

Cons: Terrible signal strength. This card was in a computer one room away from the access point and only had 60% signal strength. There was a high rate of dropped packets 12~24%, and there was a huge amount of latency (multiple seconds). The drivers on the disk aren't signed, and windows really freaks out about it. The drivers on the website aren't great either. The card is also not class compliant, so it won't work out of the box.

Overall Review: It's a ralink chipset if you're curious. I bought this so that we didn't have a cable running through the living room, and I knew wireless wouldn't be as good as gigabit, but the connection was almost unusable.

Died after a year

ASUS RT-AC87R Wireless-AC2400 Dual-band Gigabit Router
ASUS RT-AC87R Wireless-AC2400 Dual-band Gigabit Router

Pros: I had a very good experience setting this router up. I unboxed it, plugged it in, and connected to the default SSID with my cell phone. When I went to the admin page, it asked me to change the SSIDs and passwords, which I did. It then asked me if wanted the latest firmware, I said yes. Then I was up and running with the latest updates within 5 minutes. I went back to change some advanced settings, and found they were already set to how I wanted them. I took a laptop out to test the signal coverage, and found that I had at least 60% signal strength and at least 500mbps on my entire property (including outside the house). Inside the house, I had at least 80% and 700mbps. I had similar signal strengths and range with the 2.4ghz band. I haven't had any disconnects or drops on either band. It's nice to have gigabit speeds for the Wireless and WAN. Turning off Quality of Service and a couple of other features allow you to do cut-through routing, which essentially means that the CPU doesn't have to touch the packet to route it. This is a feature that will cut out a lot of latency and isn't available on many routers. Together with the high end CPU, this goes for some seriously low latency <20ms to West Des Moines, IA from rural western Iowa and <1ms local between wired and 5GHz wireless.

Cons: I would of rather had a cheaper version of this router without usb. I don't think I will ever use it. I always update the firmware on routers, but the initial firmware on this guy is not great. But since it was very easy to upgrade (click yes at the prompt and wait), I'm not going to knock an egg. This thing gets hot enough that I think it should have active cooling. It makes me worry about longevity. EDIT: This router died after about a year. I also noticed some weird problems where clients were sometimes assigned different VLANs for no reason. Rebooting would fix it.

Overall Review: My ISP is Mediacom. My cable modem is a Motorola Surfboard. My house is about 2300sqft with plaster walls. As always, you'll want to install the firmware upgrade first thing. I haven't and probably won't try the usb or qos features. Same for guest network. I think these are re-manufactured rt-ac87u, which had lots of problems. I think they are fixing those with some different parts and selling them as these, which seem to be good. It still bugs me that all the companies advertise wireless speeds as the combined speed of all bands. It's misleading. So no, you can't transmit at 2.4gbps. In fact, no one sells an 802.11ac adapters faster than 1.3gpbs.

Uptime = forever

Ubiquiti ER-X-US EdgeRouter X 5-Port Advanced Gigabit Ethernet Routers, 256MB Storage
Ubiquiti ER-X-US EdgeRouter X 5-Port Advanced Gigabit Ethernet Routers, 256MB Storage

Pros: Ubiquity advertises carrier grade reliability. So far, I can easily believe that. This is perfect for situations where you just need a router and no fancy stuff. That said, it flexible enough to do the weird stuff eg maybe you want 2 LANs and a WAN. No problem. The GUI will let you easily set up the most common configurations. There's a shell you can drop to if you want to do something interesting. There's convenient monitoring views in the GUI. CPU/Memory usage. Throughput. Connected Clients. No headaches. Once you set it up, you can forget it's there and just let it faithfully run forever. Performance has been great so far. Aside from the "Unable to load configuration" problem which took me about 20 minutes to get around, set up took only about 5 minutes to configure 1 WAN port and a 4 port switch on LAN with UPnP enabled. It's running some kind of linux so you can install more services on it if needed.

Cons: There's a bug in the GUI that requires you to kill your browser session after making some config changes. If you don't it might say "Unable to load configuration." and not let you log in. I knocked an egg off for this, because I ended up factory resetting the device a few times before I figured out what was happening. If it happens to you, just restart your browser and type the IP address in manually. The Passive PoE is not very useful and you can't use a standard PoE injector to power this router. It does come with a DC adapter though, so not a big deal. I would rather pay a little more for standard PoE or a little less and just not have it at all.

Overall Review: If you don't know what eth0 means, this isn't for you.

Solid AP, but 5Ghz could be better

Ubiquiti UniFi UAP-AC-PRO-US 802.11AC, 3x3 MIMO technology, 1300 Mbps 5 GHz POE+ Outdoor Managed Wireless Access Point
Ubiquiti UniFi UAP-AC-PRO-US 802.11AC, 3x3 MIMO technology, 1300 Mbps 5 GHz POE+ Outdoor Managed Wireless Access Point

Pros: This access point is very reliable. The management software is very good. Exceptional 2.4Ghz performance. Range meets my needs on 2.4Ghz band. Advanced features like Band Steering are nice. Good price for the features and quality. The management software supports making maps and RF scans. It looks like it would be very easy to manage a large number of these.

Cons: The 5ghz band doesn't penetrate walls or ceilings very well, and unless you're in the same room as the access point, you're going to get speeds that are comparable to the 2.4Ghz band. The 5Ghz signal is so much weaker than the 2.4Ghz band, that the band steering sends most of the clients to the 2.4Ghz band even though they support 5Ghz. There's no other devices nearby operating on the 5Ghz band (RF scan feature is neat, btw). This means you aren't going to be able to get much better than 100MB/s without putting a lot of these in. Previously, I was using a consumer router installed in the exact same location and had better speeds and signal strength on the 5Ghz band. There's no option to not use PoE, but it does come with an injector in case you don't already have PoE set up... so not a big deal.

Overall Review: I bought this for my house. I would feel comfortable installing these in an office building, but maybe they are not the best thing for a home office user with demands for high bandwidth or a high density application. (note that there is a high density version of this AP that would be better suited to for high density applications)

Flawless victory.

HP LaserJet Pro 200 color M251nw Workgroup Up to 14 ppm 600 x 600 dpi Color Print Quality Color Ethernet (RJ-45) / USB / Wi-Fi Laser Printer
HP LaserJet Pro 200 color M251nw Workgroup Up to 14 ppm 600 x 600 dpi Color Print Quality Color Ethernet (RJ-45) / USB / Wi-Fi Laser Printer

Pros: My entire experience with this printer has been great so far. I took it out of the box, removed all of the safety strips, added the wifi ssid and password using the touchscreen panel, and there it was, discoverable and ready to use for all of the PCs in the house. Windows 8.1 already had drivers for it, and there was no crapware to install. It was easy to download the drivers for Mac OS X as well, but not nearly as awesome. Finally, I tried printing some color documents and was impressed with the quality and speed of the printing. Also, the unit appeared to be brand new. At the refurbished price, this is a steal. It even came with toner intro packs, which will probably last me a long time. It also has separate cyan/yellow/magenta cartridges which was a huge upgrade from my tricolor inkjet printer.

Cons: I didn't buy it sooner. Probably won't use the "apps" or ePrint.

Overall Review: I bought this for home use to replace an inkjet. I'm sure it would be fine for any home or small office. I'm writing this review as a home user. If you do the math on toner vs ink, toner is way cheaper per page even though the cartridges are more expensive to buy.

seller reviews
  • 1

Happy customer, no issues.

Great price!

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Satisfactory
11/13/2018