Pros: The sound is clock radio decent. Works okay with my two Ipod Classics. Easy to setup. I was surprised at the radio reception (in a good way, probably due to the permanently attached antenna wire) since the old clock radio I was using had terrible reception . The alarm starts softly and builds to a peak then changes pattern

Cons: You need to download the user manual to find out how all the features work. Only a quick start guide with the most basic information is included in the box. Ipod function is *very basic*.

Overall Review: You will need the white insert that comes with your Ipod, a set of inserts isn't provided. I haven't used the shaker.

Pros: A wealth of features and pages of configuration options for just about any situation. Manual configuration was easy since I'm an old hat at setting these up (see con below). Firmware 1.01 update required to fix issues and add function of network shareport went smoothly. DHCP allows reserved addresses, good if you have a PC hosting a webcam for instance. Stateful packet inspection, Network address translation, MAC address filtering and more security features. Wireless Guest zone for (configurable) internet only access for guests. Most everything can be scheduled and have custom inbound IP filtering. -Website and domain filtering. And that's not all! Great feature set! I had great range even though the unit was located in the basement.

Cons: At every turn it says do the CD setup first. I run the CD setup and it can't detect the DIR-825 and won't proceed no matter what I tried. This unit casued a shutdown BSOD on my Win Vista Ult SP1, throwing a STOP 0x0000009F, DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE. I traced the problem to the DLink shareport driver in device manager. After accessing, it refuses to shutdown. The shareport utility replicates the USB connection at the back of the router to the client computer. Only one user can connect at a time and they have to disconnect when finished to make the USB port available to someone else. Workable but not exactly the most transparent solution. Because I have a wireless 2.4GHz camera, I tried to set a fixed channel on the 2.4GHz radio. After setting Ch4, the wireless radios were repeatedly restarting. I had to reset the 2.4GHz radio to autoscan to stop the problem.

Overall Review: Shareport is kinda neat given it's one con (see above). It seems that connecting one device (printer, scanner, flash drive tested) to the port is supported but the documentation often shows more than one device listed in the utility,,,,hmmm. I connected a hub and an Epson printer, an HP scanner and a PNY flash drive. All devices were recognized and replicated through the shareport utlity to the clients. Scanning (from the scanner) to the printer (Copy mode) worked great so some multiple device configs seems to work okay. I was also able to connect different computers to different devices (more testing required), excellent! This is a router I really want to like but some of the problems cause me to temper my enthusiasm. Hopefully a future firmware/software update will correct some of the problems I experienced. Revised 3/20,2009

Pros: I have this in the basement and I felt that the wi-fi signal upstairs was strong enough to eliminate an access point. A benefit of the LNAs in the antennas perhaps. I have several devices that support link aggregation including some L2 managed switches so I can add this to the gigabit link aggregate backbone of my network (sort of, see cons) for load balancing and failover. Setting up was pretty easy especially coming from another Netgear genie router. The VPN Server works and allows secure connections (sort of, see cons) to my home network..

Cons: The issues are numerous. Changing settings seems to almost always require a 2 minute reboot of the router. The first thing I did was set up reserved addresses and DHCP then start connecting devices. First device connected gets the reserved address for another device instead of it's assigned address. Fortunately, things have settled in and the reserved address devices all seem to be properly assigned. The email send mail service doesn't support TLS/SSL secure connections making it useless since it's difficult these days to find a service that supports insecure connections and clear text user password authentication. The router won't complete a connection to the PPTP VPN Server running on my NAS something that worked fine with my previous Netgear R6100 router . The router OpenVPN Server worked but generated 2 warnings and 3 errors using the router generated configuration script. One of the warnings is a Man In the Middle attack vulnerability. The link aggregated connection is detected and shows as active when connected to my NAS but when connected to my L2 managed switch it says inactive BUT it seems to be working anyway according to the switch (and, typically, you can't connect unless it is). Ports 4,5,6 share a 1000 mbps connection. Netgear support leaves a lot to be desired. The inability to get my PPTP traffic through the R8500 was one of two tickets I opened with Netgear support during the strictly enforced 90 complimentary installation support period and still open weeks later. First contact support offers no solutions and seems to fall back on the default of insisting you re-flash and reset the router even when he problem is a known issue that has no solution as was one ticket I opened (found the problem reported since 2012 in the Netgear community forums). Once you do that, they quickly pass you to more knowledgeable Level 2 support who also work from the script and always seem to want to arrange a phone call where they'll talk you through a lot of screenshot taking and other data/log collection. They haven't offered any solutions either. Next they escalate you to engineering but you never actually talk to an engineer, the Level 2 simply relays your responses and the engineers questions back and forth every few days. No solutions and a lot of busy work sums up my experience so far.

Overall Review: While I won't call it a con you need substantial space for this 12" wide monster. I can barely decide whether to keep it or send it back much less be able to recommend this router.

Pros: Just received this monitor a few days ago and the initial impressions are good. Arrived shipped in good condition in it's original (mostly styrofoam) packaging with no outer packaging. Setup was painless with the included display port cable connecting to an nVidia GTX670. Started up right into 2560x1440 on my Win7 x64 Pro OS. No dead pixels (so far). Good black level. No light bleed in the edges or corners. Solid color Red/Green/Blue all look good, no color variations. No problems with flashing in any of the games I tried so far (none of the ones that were reported to have problems however). Connected to a swing arm VESA 100x100 mount with no problems. I was worried that the swivel/rotation of the head might be interfered by the back cover but it was no problem and the cover gives it a cleaner look from the back. USB 3 hub connected and was recognized but see some caveats below. So far just what I was looking for.

Cons: Only one knock on the monitor. It seems that the super charging ports can't/don't connect to the USB 3 when configured for super charging. I'll have to play around with it some more to see how it works in other configurations but ports 1 & 2 don't connect to the USB 3 in the configuration I have set for super charging. Ports 3 and 4 do connect so I'm not sure if that's a feature or what or if it's configurable. Minus one star if for no other reason than that the USB 3 setup is confusing. Update: The issue with the monitor going to sleep and refusing to wake has been occurring with some regularity lately. I've been finding I need to cycle the power from the front panel to get it to wake back up.

Overall Review: I was hoping that the increased screen size would compensate for the higher resolution shrinking the text but my poor old eyes had difficulty with the default small size text. Moving to Medium helps in places where it's properly programmed for but some applications don't handle it properly resulting in cropped lines etc. Not a problem with the monitor as with the implementation of the various text sizes.

Pros: Installed in two separate computers since purchase and working great as a data / encoding drive. Samsung Magician reports 555 MB/s seq reads and 515 MB/s seq writes. Random reads at 52281 IOPS and random writes at 46816 IOPS.

Cons: None so far.

Overall Review: I saw that some others have had problems with this drive so I was a bit concerned when I purchased it but it's been doing it's duty well for a while now.

Pros: Installed on a vertical riser off an X99 Deluxe 2 mainboard. Samsung Magician reports 2590 seq reads and 1544 seq writes, 133094 IOPS on random reads and 87657 IOPS on random writes. Great encoding times combined with a Broadwell-E i7-6950x 10 core.

Cons: Subjectively, I expected more on my boot times (must be other things slowing that down).

Overall Review: I tried to benchmark with AS SSD but the measures were clearly incorrect with seq writes at around 80-90 (no better than an HDD and it subjectively didn't feel that way)

Item was as expected in a sealed blister pack. Arrived in good condition. Used DHL as shipper and they are very slow adding two days to transit time.