I have two computers. I am a Linux fan; I always have Linux in one of my partitions. I browse the net all the time. One day I felt that I am ready to start a home network. I started shopping for the network cards, the hub and all the minimal things you need to setup a network. I found the Linksys EtherFast 10/100 5-Port Starter Kit is the right one for me since it is cheap, have all the things I need in a package and is said to support most of the Operating systems.

I installed the Etherfast cards and networking within minutes in the Windows 95 systems. It took only a minute to follow the instructions to get the file and printer sharing. Wow! I became thrilled when I was able to print a test page to my network printer. The file sharing is simply great and transferring the biggest files take only a fraction of a second. The older version of the Linksys Etherfast cards used to supply Internet Lanbridge software, which was a great product for sharing Internet without a TCP/IP network and complications. Unfortunately they discontinued providing that. If you have a Windows 95 network and plan to share Internet I recommend you to get this product.

Windows is always user friendly; it is built for the common man. Unfortunately other operating systems like Linux are not that way. You may have to go through a couple of "How-to" documents to figure out what to be done. Things become difficult when you have an outdated driver on a standard distribution. This exactly has happened to the Linksys Etherfast cards. The driver for these cards is "tulip" driver software, which comes with RedHat 6.0 and 6.1. Unfortunately the "tulip" driver included with the RedHat distribution does not work with Etherfast cards since Linksys has changed the chip-set used in their later Etherfast cards. So if you are using Linux, you may have to go to the LinkSys website to download the tulip.c driver program, recompile it and install it. Sound complicated, but the instructions in their web site is clear and can be followed easily (I assume you won?t be dumb if you are smart enough to run Linux).

The only problem I find with all bundles is that you loose a lot of flexibility in choosing many individual items. You may have a laptop and you may require a PCMCIA network card, which obviously is not included with this bundle. The 10-foot cable included with this bundle is sufficiently long, but you may not need a 10-foot networking cable lying on your room, entangling the already complex wiring you have. If you had choice to buy individual products separately, then you might have chosen better and more satisfying products and might have ended paying a little lesser than the Linksys Etherfast bundle's price.

In brief, this product is well suited for
1. Home networking and for Windows based systems. Can be installed in Linux based systems without much difficulty.
2. For users who does not want to search around for individual products like hubs, network cards and cables separately

I will not recommend this product if you already have more than 4 computers to connect.




Recommended: Yes