Until tonight, I have been growing more and more dissatisfied with my router. I won’t name names right now, but others have had issues with it, too. It’s extra frustrating, since this is a router on the Official Microsoft XBox 360 Approved Router List. If you don’t feel like clicking through, then in summary, this particular router just. isn’t. stable. It restarts constantly. During game sessions. During Windows Update. During podcast recording sessions. Transferring files to my NAS. Et cetera. It’s gotten worse as my network usage has increased lately, and firmware upgrades accomplish nothing for this several-year-old model, which one might imagine would have reached a stable state. This was not a bargain router, either, retailing around $150 when I picked mine up. In the end, I am an EXTREMELY dissatisfied customer, and will not recommend this brand, or purchase it myself, ever again.
After reading around, I have decided to upgrade to an Apple AirPort Extreme router. This should carry me through the nearly-inevitable upgrade to 802.11n that I foresee in the next couple of years, while supporting my existing assortment of devices. I went with it for two reasons. A, it was feature-rich for the price, supporting 802.11a or b/g in addition to n, and sporting a USB attachment to share some hard drives or printers over the network. B, I’ve just never had serious hardware trouble with an Apple product, including three iPods, a laptop, and a bunch of small pieces. The new router is now installed, running, and looking quite natty (pun intended) in my hardware rack. Wish me luck! After all, if my network starts working reliably again, I might even have time to finish my piece on enums.
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Update: I had some issues with this router as well, but they were “getting settled in” type issues. But, as a bit of forewarning to my fellow “I use PCs, but I sure do LIKE Mac” enthusiasts: This machine HATES sharing a FAT32 drive. I’m serious. Try it if you want, but using FAT32 to share between Windows machines will inevitably lead to the router crashing or becoming unresponsive. However, I found an acceptable workaround — format your network drive has HFS+ (aka “Mac OS Extended”) and then share it via the router. Down side: It won’t work via direct PC USB connection anymore (unless you grab something like MacDrive to allow your PC to read HFS. And it’ll still choke on very large (>1GB) files. But really, how many >1GB files do you have? So on the up side, my shared drive now works again from our variety of PCs and laptops, via Windows File Sharing.