Pros: I tested the ST4000VN000 4 TB 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s Internal Hard Drive. This hard drive can be found on NewEgg under SKU: N82E16822178393. This is the largest of Seagate's new NAS drive line. First a little history: Last summer Western Digital created a new line of hard drives specifically designed for use in NAS systems, called the red series. A year later we now have Seagate following suit with their three new NAS drives, in capacities of: 2, 3 and 4 TB. Anytime you cram up to five hard drives into a small box, you are going to have heat issues. Both manufacturers try to solve the heat problem by running their NAS drives at a reduced RPM. I believe this drive operates at 5,900 RPM. Seagate does not publish an RPM spec anywhere that I could find on their website. I got this spec from a review on the similar Seagate HDD.15 model desktop drive on Legit Storage Reviews. Seagate can operate this drive at a reduced RPM, because they are only using four platters instead of five like WD does in their Black and Enterprise 4 TB series. Seagate is able to do this, due to the drive's outstanding areal density specification. NAS is an abbreviation for Network Attached Storage. NAS systems are small computers that attach to your LAN network and typically hold from 1-5 HDD, for SOHO work environments. Most NAS units only require an AC power and a network connection. My custom-built unit sits on a shelf in my basement. They are useful for backing up your home and small business computers and for storing large amounts of data. In the home they can be used to store: digital pictures, videos, MP3 tunes, Etc. NAS units do not need fast hard drives. The reason for this is the LAN network is typically the bandwidth (speed) bottleneck, not the hard drive. So installing an ultra-fast 7,200, or 10K RPM drive into a NAS box, would simply be a waste of money. Because this is a NAS specific hard drive, I did not run any desktop benchmarks on it. Most NAS units support RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks), a specification that is important to RAID systems, involves error recovery control (ERC), or as WD refers to it, time-limited error recovery (TLER). All hard drives occasionally have to take themselves offline for several seconds, or even minutes to perform read/write error recovery. These maintenance sessions are used to move data from weak sectors to good sectors. The entire process can take upwards of 30 seconds, or longer to complete. Most RAID controllers will mark a drive as dirty (malfunctioning), if it goes offline for more than 7 seconds. This can result in the RAID controller taking the entire array offline for hours, as it attempts to rebuild the data on the unresponsive drive. Seagate has set the ERC on this drive to less than 7 seconds. This is the number one reason most desktop hard drives make lousy RAID drives. Unlike desktop drives, these NAS specific hard drives from Seagate are designed to operate 24 x 7.

Cons: None so far. The new drive has performed flawlessly in the two weeks I have been testing it. I will to add to this review later, if anything changes. I think that Seagate has done an excellent job of balancing the needs of this new NAS model series to their specific application as NAS system drives.

Overall Review: I installed this drive into a custom-built NAS system that I built for my home-based computer consulting business in December of 2012. Most of the parts were purchased from NewEgg. It consists of a Cooler Master Elite 343 mid-tower micro-ATX case, with an AMD Athlon X2-270 (3.4 GHz) 64-bit processor, an Asus model M5A78L-M LX PLUS motherboard w/Bios: 1201, dated 08/20/2012, a Cooler Master GX-450 Bronze power supply, it runs the NAS4Free - BSD Unix operating system. This NAS system replaced an older NAS unit I built that ran NASLite Linux. After many years of dependable use, it suffered a motherboard failure due to bulging capacitors. The NAS4Free impressed me with its modern web-based administrator's interface. The NAS4Free OS boots off of an 8 GB Micro SD Flashcard, installed in a Rosewill USB 2.0 model RCR-IC001 card reader. The system has 4 GB of G. Skill DDR3 RAM memory installed. Currently it has three hard drives. In addition to this Seagate drive, it has a WDC WD5003ABYX-01WERA1 500 GB Enterprise drive and a WDC WD20EARS-00MVWB0 green series 2.0 TB drive. No RAID is in use at this time. NAS4Free supports SMART monitoring of hard drives, so it's interesting to note that the Seagate ST4000VN000, is the coolest drive of the group at 23°C. The hottest drive is the WD Enterprise drive, which operates at 28°C. The reason it runs hotter is that its the only drive that is spinning at 7200 RPM. My WD green drive, which BTW also operates at a reduced RPM, runs at a modest 25°C. I highly recommend NAS4Free, if you are interested in building your own NAS system like I did. Like its name implies the cost is free. Although the developers would appreciate a donation for their efforts. It's based on BSD Unix, which is also used by Apple for their MAC OS 10.x. The NAS4Free operating system has been extremely stable. I have never had to reboot it, except for routine maintenance. Once the initial OS installation setup is completed, all other configuration settings are handled via a modern web interface, using your favorite web browser. I would not recommend NAS4Free for newbies. I had to get help from a friend who is a Unix programmer, on setting up the drive mount points and the SAMBA protocol share settings. SAMBA is important, because it enables Windows computers to access the Unix formatted hard drives. The hard drives were all formatted with the standard BSD Unix UFS file system. The 64-bit NAS4Free had no problems formatting this 4.0 TB hard drive. The formatted drive provided 3.5 TB of usable disk storage space. One other advantage of using BSD Unix, is that it is unaffected by most Windows viruses. At the current cost on NewEgg of $190.00 for the 4.0 TB hard drive model I reviewed, these Seagate NAS drives are priced very competitive. They also come with a 3-year manufacturers warranty. You could probably sneak one of these into a desktop computer for use as a data drive, mated with an SSD boot drive, without any issues. Highly recommended!

Pros: I reviewed the TP-Link model TL-WPA4220KIT - WIFI Range Extender/Repeater/AV500 Power-line Kit. This kit includes two Home Plug AV devices, two Ethernet patch cables a resource CD, and two Quick Installation Guides. Each white patch cable was about 6.5 feet long. These can be easily replaced with longer cables, purchased separately if needed. TP-Link refers to the smaller of the two units as the powerline adapter, also known as the model TL-PA4010. The other half of the kit is the Power-line/WIFI Ethernet Adapter model TL-WPA4220, or Access Point (AP). This larger unit receives the HomePlug signals sent over your AC power lines from the powerline adapter. It can also act as a WIFI booster for a weak area of your home. In additon to WIFI, the TL-WPA4220 AP also offers two 10/100 Ethernet jacks. These could be handy if you want to provide Internet access to: a smart TV, a game box, a home theater system, or a desktop/laptop computer. The smaller of the two plugin devices, AKA the TL-PA4010 powerline adapter, creates a 300 Mb/s HomePlug AV LAN network inside your home's wiring. The bandwidth is rated at 500 Mbps between your router and the TL-PA4010 adapter. Because it relies on the existing AC wiring inside your home, it avoids the need to have your home hard-wired for Ethernet. However it is subject to a few limitations. The first being the overall network speed is limited to 300 Mbps per HomePlug device, as compared to 1000 Mbps for Ethernet. There is also a 300 meter AC cable length limitation. Lastly the receiving HomePlug device needs to be on the same AC line phase, or it may not receive the Internet signal. Oddly during my testing I would see a strong WIFI signal from the TL-WPA4220 WIFI AP, but no Internet or LAN connectivity when plugged into the wrong phase. Avoid plugging the units into outlets with heavy appliances like washers, dryers, refrigerators, or air conditioners connected to them. The motors in these appliances can give off a lot of electrical noise that will interfere with the HomePlug devices. Up to eight HomePlug AV devices can be used in a single household. I started setting up the two units by plugging them both into a standard 4 foot wall strip, without any surge protection. TP-Link cautions in their instructions, not to plug the units into surge protectors or extension cords. Next a pairing button is pressed on each unit to allow them to negotiate the same 128-bit AES encryption codes and connect with each other. Encryption is important so your neighbors can't access your private HomePlug network. After I got the two units "paired-up", I next tried moving the TL-WPA4220 AP to different outlets around my house. By plugging the TL-WPA4220 into an outlet near my kitchen table, the WIFI signal produced by the TL-WPA4220 was a solid 5 bars of excellent WIFI reception over the entire kitchen/living room level.

Cons: This had to be one of the more frustrating reviews that I have done for NewEgg. The biggest problem I ran into was the poor documentation included with this kit. The only hard instructions were two brief Quick Installation Guides, consisting of a separate set of instructions for each plugin device, versus a unified guide. The instructions on the CD were also two separate manuals. I found a better updated combined user manual at TP-Link's website that covered both devices. I also found the two utility programs on the CD to be confusing and inadequate for troubleshooting connection problems. I think that my electrical lines maybe too noisy to support HomePlug AV at 300 Mbps. I as only able to get an 11 Mbs between the two deivces on the same outlet strip, according to TP-Link's utility program. TP-Link is very inconsistent as to how they refer to the two HomePlug devices in the various user manuals, using a mixture terms only a network engineer could love. All they had to do is call the source the the HomePlug Source and the TL-WPA4220 the Access Point and be consistent in that usage throughout the manuals. Plugging in the TL-WPA4220 AP caused an immediate IP address conflict with my home's router, causing my home LAN network to go offline. This is because the TL-WPA4220 AP comes preset to IP address: 192.168.1.1, the same gateway address used by my home's Western Digital router. This is actually a very common base IP address used by many different brands of routers including: ASUS, 3COM, Belkin, Linksys, D-Link, and Netgear. Apple has also started using this non-routable IP address range in their newest versions of its Airport Extreme and the Time Capsule. TP-Link could have simply set the TL-WPA4220 AP to a less seldom used gateway IP address by default for the HomePlug network, or perhaps use DHCP? This default base IP address choice will probably have a lot of customers calling the TP-Link technical support line. This problem should be fixable with a factory firmware update. One last complaint is the hard to read light gray labeling, that is supposed to identify the functions of the various ports and status LEDs, against the off-white plastic background color of the two HomePlug units. With little or no color contrast, the user has to squint to read what the labels are trying to tell him or her. TP-Link needs to pick a text color that has better contrast against the base plastic color. The color "black" might be a good place to start. This seems to be ongoing issue with TP-Link products that I have reviewed. I call it art-over-function.

Overall Review: LAN Speed Test v 3.4 gave the following speed test results: Mbps: Same Outlet Strip - (LAN Port) Write Speed: 60.385088 Read Speed: 50.448328 Mbps: Same Outlet Strip - ( WIFI-N) Write Speed: 43.656784 Read Speed: 67.556112 Mbps: Kitchen Outlet - (WIFI-N) Write Speed: 12.510016 Read Speed: 12.021032 Mbps: Garage Outlet - (WIFI-N) Write Speed: 25.201568 Read Speed: 34.80516 I ran each bandwidth test five times and then averaged the resulting data. I started by directly connecting my ThinkPad T410 laptop to an Ethernet port on the TL-WPA4220 AP, with a supplied patch cable. This gave the fastest results. But way below the specified 300 Mbps throughput. This was performed with the two HomePlug devices plugged into the same four foot long outlet strip above my test bench. With the same setup in the second test, I connected my T410 via WIFI-N to the TL-WPA4220 AP. This is pretty close to WIFI-G throughput speeds. But not too impressive, for WIFI-N. The third test above was conducted using the TL-WPA4220 AP plugged into an outlet located under my kitchen table. These results were well below what I normally get with my WD WIFI-N router. The TL-WPA4220 AP always gave an excellent 5-bar WIFI connection. The HomePlug house wiring portion of the system seems to be the network bottleneck. In the last garage test, with 270 Feet of Romex cable in the HomePlug network pathway and two breaker boxes; the results were decent, considering the AC wiring distance involved. I think I will stick with my installed 100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet system though. I am at a loss to explain the poor bandwidth test results. Unfortunately the provided utility programs were useless for assisting in tweaking the HomePlug portion of the network. Maybe TP-Link could add their comments? My overall opinion of the TP-Link model TL-WPA4220 Power line kit after working with it for the past two weeks, is that it includes hardware that is beta quality at best. It is further marred by a confusing user installation experience, due to poor installation software and two convoluted Quick Installation Guides. TP-Link needs to create an installation wizard tapered specifically to the two units included in this kit. I am sure many of these kits will be purchased by users of other router brands, than TP-Link routers. The kit should be compatible with all major router brands on the market. This is an area where a more intelligent setup program would have improved the out-of-the-box experience. I would not recommend this kit to people who know little about setting up networking devices, unless you can obtain help from a knowledgeable friend or associate.

Pros: It has larger batteries than most units in its price class. The price seemed right at the time of purchase. I have experienced too many issues with other brands of UPS units lately. I see Liebert equipment in use at the mainframe sites with the raised floors that I service at. Their AC units are very popular for example in large server rooms. There is usually a big difference between commercial grade equipment and consumer grade. One is the cost of commercial grade. So we consumers who are not rich are stuck with buying the consumer grade products and dealing with their cost cutting issues.

Cons: Would not work out of the box, although the bottom line, of page one, of the quick start manual states and I quote: "The UPS unit ships with the internal battery connected." The UPS refused to turn-on, so I opened the battery compartment and found it was disconnected from its dual 12VDC battery set. This could have occurred due to rough shipping, as there is no locking plug mechanism on the battery cable. No latch and the heavy battery set can shift inside its compartment, spells problems if you move this unit around. The software installs by default into your C: drive's root directory, like a DOS program? Plus it installs a way outdated version of Java, I think it was v11.x. I had security alerts popping up after rebooting. Evidently the control software does not like the current version of Java. Yes the UPS control software requires Java in order to work. While the browser world wants to get rid of Java, because it is not very secure. This whole unit seems to be a bit outdated in its technology. My hope was the better batteries would outlast the low-quality Asian batteries that APC puts in their consumer grade UPS units. I have had way too many problems with APC UPS not maintaining their batteries properly, or the batteries failing within 3 months of use.

Overall Review: With the software installed and the UPS working I thought okay, now I can move on to other more important issues. After about a week of use I came down in the AM and my PC was shutdown. If I restarted it, it would bootup to the Windows 7 desktop, then immediately power itself off, like it had a bad power supply or a virus. Then I thought to disconnect the USB link to the UPS from the back of my PC. Problem solved. The UPS shows that it is completely charged and all of the voltages and batteries seem to be fine, so why does it think there is no AC line input, when my DVM shows 122 VAC at the outlet, and it still wants to shut my PC down? I will be contacting Liebert technical support. If they can't get this working right its going back.

Pros: I reviewed the Gigabyte Model GA-Z97X-SOC Force motherboard with an Intel Socket 1150, Rev 1 configuration for NewEgg. Note SOC stands for Super Over-Clock. This model is primarily aimed at serious gamers who like to over-clock their hardware to obtain the best possible performance from their Intel processors and memory. Since a motherboard is just foundation piece for a desktop system, the following additional parts were installed to complete the final system: Intel i7-4790S APU, rated 3.2-4.0 GHz (Turbo), with a TDP of 65 Watts and with built-in i4600 graphics. For the DRAM we used G. Skill Ripjaws X-series DDR3-2133, P/N F3-17000CL11D-8GBXL DRAM, rated CL11-11-11-30, at 1.5 to 1.6 Volts. The boot drive was a PNY 240 GB SATA-III 6GB/s SSD drive we got on sale from NewEgg. For power a new Rosewill Capstone 750 Watt, 80 Plus, Gold rated power supply, with a 7-year MFR warranty, was pressed into service. These are nice, quiet, and reliable power supplies. An LG Black 16X SATA Blu-ray Burner model WH16NS40 was our choice of optical drive. This drive can also burn archival quality M-Discs. I plan to use Blu-ray (BR) disks to backup our Centos Server OS. Also feel free to copy the recipe of parts I used in this project to build your own Windows desktop or Centos Linux server system. Extreme gamers may wish to add a high-end graphics card and a water cooler. Other than wading through hundreds of potential BIOS tweaks, setup under Windows 10 64-bit Enterprise Preview was a breeze. Why Win10? Well for one it’s currently available as a free download and I thought NewEgg's customers would like to see a review covering a bleeding edge MB, running a state-of-the-art operating system. The only setup snag encountered involved the driver disk supplied by Gigabyte refusing to run under Windows 10. It gave some script errors and then crashed. Since Win10 is still in beta, this was not an unexpected issue. Builders tip: Skip this driver disk altogether and go to the MB manufacturer's website and download the latest drivers from there. Typically these driver disks are pressed months before the motherboards have even been finalized, so they can be ready when the boards ship. As a result these included driver disks are frequently out-of-date before they hit the retail shelves. The Gigabyte website Windows 8 drivers seemed to work fine under Windows 10. As far as the special features on this MB, there are simply too many to list in the space allotted for this review. I would recommend that potential buyers watch NewEgg's excellent video on the overview page. The Gigabyte rep on that video does a great job of explaining the many MB features.

Cons: None that I could find during my two-week testing period. One weird problem I ran into during initial testing was when the system was shutdown, the Windows 10 would shut down, but all of the fans, including the CPU fan, would keep running. Flipping the rocker switch on the power supply then killed the fans and when powered back on, they stayed-off. As a test we threw in a Centos Linux live boot disk, it had the same issue. When all else fails, reading the supplied MB manual from Gigabyte quickly cleared-up the mystery. There is a configuration button on the motherboard with a lightening bolt on it. It’s intended for over-clockers to use to keep the fans running in between O. C. sessions, to cool off any hot components. Toggling this switch allowed the MB to shut down normally, sans fans, under both Centos and Windows 10. There is another switch that also proved very handy. The Rosewill server case we were using had a key-locked front door that covered-up the front power switch. Gigabyte has conveniently placed a lighted power on/off switch right on the MB, where it can be easily reached by a builder during setup and testing. There are many other specialized switches for O. C. experts to use, as well as some short test leads that can be plugged into the MB. These test leads accept a standard voltmeter probe tip. These short lead extenders allow direct reading of memory and bus voltages for precise over-clocking. Another builders tip: Do not trust the voltage/temperature readings provided by BIOS menus and utility programs running in Windows. The most accurate method is to measure the voltages at test points on the MB, or at the power supply plugs. For MB temperatures use a good quality laser temperature scanner. Again this is not a con, but while this MB has four PCI-X16 slots, only one runs at the full X16 bus speed. This is a limitation of the Intel PCI-Express version 3.0 bus standard. So if you install a graphics card, make sure you install it into the X16 slot closest to the CPU. The third slot down is rated X8 and the two remaining X16 slots run at X4 speed. One last oddity that still remains a mystery; The MB simulates two generic flash drives that show up as empty drive letters in the Windows drive manager and the Windows File Explorer. I have not been able to figure out what the purpose is for these two simulated flash drives. The downside is that they waste two drive letters I would have preferred to have assigned to other storage devices. One guess is since flash memory is used for modern UEFI BIOS, and this MB has a dual BIOS feature, perhaps Windows 10 incorrectly identified the two flash BIOS as flash storage devices. One drive was listed as a Compact Flash drive. The second was listed as a "generic" flash device. If anyone knows what these are, please enlighten me?

Overall Review: As far as the onboard graphics is concerned, the Intel 4600 graphics system built into the i7-4790S processor had no problems running Windows 10. I did not have a 4K monitor available to test the 4K output from the MB. For our eventual file server purposes, the onboard graphics was more than sufficient. The Gigabyte MB has an assortment of video output jacks including: VGA, DVI, HDMI-4K and Displayport 4K. Most non-gamer, or moderate game users will be able to skip installing an add-on graphics card. A special thanks goes out to a friend of mine named JP who stepped-up to supply some of the more expensive parts required to complete this review system. JP originally wanted to go with a water cooler, but the lack of any rear 120mm fan openings on the Rosewill RSV-4000 4U rack mount server case he supplied, killed that idea. So instead I used the supplied Intel heat sink fan. This Intel Haswell processor ran so cool that a water cooler is really not needed for normal desktop usage. When the Centos OS Live disk was booted-up, all of the MB hardware, including the Atheros e2200 Killer Ethernet NIC, worked fine except for the Realtek audio system. Since this is going to be a file server, an audio system is not necessary. If you want to run a desktop version of Linux like Mint, it should not be that hard to find a suitable Realtek audio driver. Even with the relatively brief two week test session with this Gigabyte Model GA-Z97X-SOC Force motherboard, its solid stability was very impressive. Not once did it cause a Blue Screen, even using a beta version of Windows 10. I would expect even better results under Windows 7 Pro 64-bit, where the drivers are more mature. When you sum up all of the features this motherboard has to offer and with the retail price dropping, I would have no problem recommending this to someone looking to build a gaming desktop, video editing station, home theater PC, or even a file server.

Pros: Please see my original review of the Archer C9 router for the Pros.

Cons: An outdated firmware updating method dogs this otherwise fine router. See my previous review for other Cons. I would still like to see Windows workgroup support added to the USB storage option.

Overall Review: My previous review ended on a sour note. As part of the review process I waited till near the end of the review test period to install a factory firmware update to the test router. The update seemed to go okay until it hit the 70% completed mark on the progress meter, then for no apparent reason an error message popped-up stating the connection had been lost to the router. After rebooting the router, it acted like it was bricked. It could logon to my ISP's server, but had no Internet connectivity. The 1.0 Gb/s LAN switch section worked okay, but none of my computers could access the Internet. I had to install an older backup router in order to submit my review. I emailed TP-Link technical support the following day. They got back to me within a few hours. At the suggestion of TP-Link's technical support adviser, I did a factory reset on the router. This seemed to do the trick. I then had to go back and re-enter all of my previous customized router settings. I was unable to use the previously exported configuration file saved on my hard drive. Since factory reset was completed the router seems to be working fine. The new firmware seems to have fixed the issue with the slow Android device connectivity mentioned under Cons in my previous review. As a result, I have updated my review from a 1-Egg rating to a 4-Egg rating due to this positive outcome. I think that this router provides a lot of bang for the buck at its current discounted retail price. I can now recommend the router, but be very cautious about applying any firmware updates to this model. TP-Link needs to follow the lead of other router brands that allow the user to click on an "update button" and the router automatically goes out to a server and downloads the latest firmware updates. After applying the new updates the router reboots itself. It should not be necessary to perform a factory reset every time an update is installed. Recommended for advanced users only.

Pros: This review covers the TP-LINK TL-WA860RE 300Mbps Universal Wi-Fi Range Extender/Repeater with Power Outlet Pass-through, Dual External Antennas, Wall Plug AC connection, One-button Setup, and Smart Signal Indicator. This WIFI booster also has an Ethernet port on the bottom and includes a one meter long Ethernet patch cable. The WA860RE comes with a quick installation guide which was adequate. There are two methods listed for setting up the booster. Using the first method was easy: You simply plug the WA860RE into an electrical outlet near your main router, and then press the WPS button on your router and the WPS button on the WA860RE booster. The two devices will then pair-up with each other. When the connection LED stops blinking and remains on solid green it indicates the booster is connected to your router. Now you can unplug the booster and move it to an outlet roughly halfway between your main router and the room that needs the signal boosted. A solid green LED indicates an ideal location, a solid orange LED indicates the booster is too close to the router and a blinking orange LED indicates the booster is too far away from the router. This setup method produces a clone of your main router’s SSID. This should work good for most WIFI users. Using the second setup method, plug the booster into an outlet near your router. If your desktop or laptop is connected via Ethernet, you will need to first unplug that connection. Using your laptop’s wireless connection icon, look for the booster’s default network name TP-Link_Extender #, then click the connect icon. In your browser, go to the booster’s internal web page at: http://tplinkextender.net, a password screen will open, type “admin” for both the username and the password. A quick wizard will open next to guide you through the remaining four setup steps. At this point I would have liked to have seen two more steps added; one to change the booster’s SSID name and another to change the easily guessable “admin” password. For testing purposes I found it easier to connect my laptop using the supplied Ethernet patch cable to the booster’s Ethernet outlet. With a wired connection to the booster I was able to access its internal web pages without interruption. One of the first things I did was to change the default password to something more secure. I also changed unit’s the SSID, so I could tell the WA860RE apart from my main router’s SSID for review testing. This is where things started to fall apart, see the cons section below:

Cons: This booster seemed to have difficulty connecting to my WD AC-1300 router. This occurred even in the same room as the host router. My laptop connected to the WA860RE would indicate it had a network connection, but no DNS service, so you could not access the Internet. It was odd because I had messages from my Windows Home Server popping up from an icon on the task bar indicating a LAN connection, but I could not access the Internet. I then wasted several hours trying to get the WA860RE to properly connect to my WD AC-1300 router. The other oddity was that the status screen in the WA860RE web portal would always indicate that it had a working Internet connection, but my laptop still had no Internet connectivity. Evidently it has difficulty reading the DNS server IP addresses from my WD router. This appears to be a firmware bug in the WA860RE, as I have never experienced this problem with any other WIFI devices. If I went into the WA860RE’s DHCP settings and turned-off auto mode and then manually entered the IP addresses for OpenDNS.com, then my laptop could access the Internet. As a workaround I tried manually entering the WA860RE into my WD router’s DHCP client table, with a fixed static IP address, above my normal DHCP IP range. This is where I normally stick my network connected laser printers. Even with this added effort the WA860RE still had no Internet connectivity. Only manually entering the IP address for a DNS server would enable devices connected to it, to be able to access the Internet. More Odd Behavior Dept: With my laptop connected via the WA860RE’s Ethernet port, I opened the booster’s status screen and it had an orange exclamation mark between the range extender icon and the Main Router/AP icon and a red “X” indicating no router and no Internet connection, yet my laptop was able to surf the Internet with no problems, weird eh! I made sure to switch off the WIFI radio on my Lenovo T410 ThinkPad during this testing phase. I looked on TP-Link’s website, but no new firmware was available for the WA860RE during the testing/review period. Minor Complaints Dept: Even though the WA860RE is advertised as an N300 device it never connected any faster than 144.4 Mbps to my WD AC-1300 router. The provided 1 meter long patch cable is too short to be of much use. A 7’ long cable would have been more useful.

Overall Review: I liked the pass thru AC outlet on the WA860RE, but I question why TP-Link did not place a warning sticker advising the user of how much Amperage/Wattage capacity the pass through outlet could safely handle. Not that I would ever connect a toaster to it, but someone else might in a kitchen setting, or they might plug a laser printer into it, which could cause the WA860RE to suffer a melt down. Another suggestion would be to make the male outlet prongs on the backside rotatable like some new extension cord plugs can do. This would allow you to orientate the antennas vertically in a horizontally mounted receptacle. I have just such an outlet strip setup over my computer test bench. With the WA860RE setup on its own fixed IP address, and primary and secondary DNS server IP addresses manually entered, I moved it out to my garage and tested it there. As my garage is attached to the house I plugged it into an outlet on the wall closest to the house. The signal strength was excellent, with a full set of signal strength bars displayed on my laptop. Using the LAN-Speed Test benchmark set for the default 1.0 MB size test file, the WA860RE could write the file to my basement NAS server over my WIFI to the WD-AC router and on to my Gigabit LAN network at 18.9 Mbps upload. But download speeds were a third slower at only 5.8 Mbps. I would have expected just the opposite results, as reads are usually faster than writes over my home network. Moving the unit to my kitchen, I first tried an AC outlet near the sink that caused the WA860RE to completely lose my router’s WIFI signal. Moving the WA860RE to an adjacent back wall receptacle, produced a full strength WIFI signal, for my laptop. WIFI-N is said to have signal lobe patterns and this may be a good example of that effect in action. The throughput was a little slower in the kitchen at 16.5 Mbps writing (upload) and 5.4 Mbps reading (download). In conclusion I think the WA860RE is an effective WIFI booster/range extender with a few rough edges. Hopefully these can be smoothed-out with a future firmware update. Most people would not need bother to change the WA860RE’s SSID name and could use the simpler WPS cloning setup method detailed in the second paragraph under Pros above. I would recommend the WA860RE to a friend, if the firmware bugs listed above under Cons are fixed. I experienced too many connectivity issues with the TP-Link WA860RE to make an unconditional recommendation at this time.

The seller provided good service. I have bought from them before.

The motherboard worked fine out of the box.

The seller provided excellent service. The motherboard worked without any issues.