Thursday, March 15, 2012



NOT ALL ROUTERS ARE EQUAL

Study your needs, choose one that fits them


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Several years ago when we purchased two Roku boxes, we found that getting the signal to the bedroom was hit-or-miss, so I started looking around for a suitable replacement. Only one of our laptops had "N" wireless - the others were all "G", and the Roku boxes were "N". After careful study, I selected Netgear's 600n [WNDR3700], which is a dual-band router where everything up to and including "G" wireless was on the 2.4GHz frequency, while my "N" wireless devices used the 5GHz frequency. No more streaming issues, PLUS, the router had a USB port on it so I could attach an external USB hard drive to it and put photos and other stuff we both used on the shared drive and connect to it from anywhere in the house. It was a nice bonus. 2 years later - it's still working great, but now there is the Netgear 600n Premium edition (below).


WNDR3800



BACKSIDE OF WNDR3800





It's very close in specifications to the 3700 which a couple additions. The first one is that it supports Readyshare printing from the USB port, and has a dedicated video mode which helps streaming video to your other wireless devices at home. Other features include the ClearChannel selector which automatically scans the channels to determines what channel has little or no activity. Which helps get it's signal to you and your devices. For TIVO users, you can use that external hard drive to extend your TIVO media storage.

Finally, the WNDR3800 has a feature called "ReadySHARE Cloud" which, when set up correctly will allow you to access the data you have stored on your external hard drive from just about anywhere you can get Internet Access from, and yes, I have one now that I'm setting up (in between my other home IT duties) and when I get around to it I'll play around with my "CLOUD", just to see what happens**


** If you missed a couple of my earlier posts, don't forget to secure the router, and due to possible hacking issues with the WPS feature, make sure you disable it.

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