back to wireless soon
We are expecting to have a new WiFi 802.11g router sometime today. I found a place with not the best price, but free shipping that made up for the difference. They also had a $20 rebate, which makes the price much better. I try not to let rebates factor into my decisions, and without the rebate this was still as good a price as anywhere else I found. I selected the SMC 2804WBRP-G. Our first router (non-wireless) was an SMC, and as far as I know it's still working fine for dglenn. (We switched to wireless because an AirPort card and a WiFi router was far cheaper than replacing an iBook system board with a broken Ethernet socket. Once we had wireless, we were wondering why we hadn't done it sooner.)
This particular SMC model had some negative comments on the web, but none were recent, so I hope upgrades have fixed the problems people reported. There were also comments saying it was fine or great, so go figure. Some of the negative comentators said they'd had previous SMC routers and were happy with them, but this model was a serious disappointment in comparison. We'll see....
At order checkout, the free shipping turned out to be "budget" shipping taking 7-9 work days. From my order date that would include 2 weekends and a holiday - 12-14 calendar days, plus another 1-2 days of vendor processing up front. To my great surprise and delight, it's coming by FedEx, and order tracking says it's on a local truck today. (Oddly, the tracking page says estimated delivery is tomorrow.) Ordered Wednesday night, and here Friday!
I'm not entirely thrilled with this vendor, Buy.com, though. It took far too long to read their Terms and Conditions and their Privacy Policy, which you say you're agreeing to when you place your order. I found section 5 of their T&C (Digital Downloads) totally absurd. They can rest assured that I won't be buying any music from them.
I mentioned before that I was interested in a router from Compex that had USB 1.1 connections to hook up a printer and a disk that could be shared on the LAN. Since then I found another Compex router with 4 USB 2.0 ports for sharing printers or disks. But as before, I couldn't find enough information to be comfortable buying it. I didn't find any reviews, and very few user comments - one of which said that the router could be configured only with the Compex software (which probably runs only on MSWin PCs), not with a browser. That's a deal-breaker for me. (And I was really getting hot for network-attached storage, too.)
I was looking at some other brands for 802.11g routers with print servers. Netgear's model has USB 2.0 for the printer, which beats the SMC, but it costs quite a bit more, and Netgear is the brand that just died on me. US Robotics has one, but user comments were at both extremes about its signal/connection quality. I can't remember now why I dismissed Linksys, and D-Link didn't seem to offer the router/print-server combo. I found a few more unheard-of brands, but other than the Compex they had no outstanding features, and some were rather expensive with no justification. Some models had proprietary speed boosting beyond 802.11g, but that's useless for us because we're locked in to Apple's wireless cards. The SMC says it's "high power", which might make for better/farther connections - or not. I don't know how much power the competitors have, and if the laptops' transmissions can't be picked up by the base, extra power at the base doesn't do any good.
And I won't be playing with it much tonight - I have a concert to sing....