Worst Networking Experience
At the new apartment Jill and I are having a little problem with our wireless network. I have an older D-Link DI-614+ that doesn’t have quite a strong enough signal to provide good networks speeds throughout the apartment. It has worked great for years, but it’s on one end of the apartment and we use our laptops largely on the other end in the living room. There are a number of walls between us and it, so it’s understandable that it’s having some difficulty getting to us.
Our first solution was to get a new G router that would hopefully provide faster speeds. First we tried the Linksys WRT54GS. Then we tried a Netgear WGT624. We went back to the Linksys WRT54GS but added a Linksys WRE54G. All of these have been returned and we are back to using the D-Link. We are now contemplating purchasing an Apple AirPort Extreme. If we still need a network extender we would be able to get an AirPort Express, although that’s an expensive solution.
Here are the shortcomings of each router we tried, and why I will likely never buy one of their products again, especially Linksys:
Linksys WRT54GS
My biggest problem with this router is that its configuration site doesn’t work in Firefox on a Mac. I’m not sure if it works in Firefox at all, but I wasn’t able to try it in Windows. It did work in Camino though, so once I figured that it it made things a bit easier.
However, the second time I tried to set it up (with a new actual router since the first one had already been returned) I wasn’t able to get it on the internet.
Linksys not only doesn’t give any instructions on how to set up its products with a Mac, its user guides crash Preview when they are opened. Luckily I had Acrobat, but most people using OS X don’t bother with Acrobat since they have Preview installed by default.
Netgear WGT624
This router wasn’t the easiest to setup. It mis-diagnosed the type of internet connection I had, it wanted me to manually set up my IP and other network settings. I was able to get it up and running on the internet through the advanced settings. However, once I got that part figured out I had no problems with it. However, it still wasn’t strong enough and didn’t improve the connection speed in the living room.
Linksys WRE54G
This is one of the worst products I’ve purchased in years. Do not buy this network extender. I found a site giving step by step instructions on how to set up a WRE54G. Even though I tried following these instructions I was never able to connect to the extender’s web interface. I even tried to set it up with all three routers at various stages. I was at least expecting it to work with the Linksys WRT54GS but I wasn’t even able to get that working. This was the most frustrating product of the three because it never got working at all.