Sure, it looks intimidating for some people at first, but like a hammock, it's surprisingly easy to get into and quite comfortable when you're there. I paid 89$ for mine, with a 20$ mail in rebate (MIR), final price was about 76$ shipped.

In the box, was a squat black box made of sturdy black plastic (they used to be made of steel), a power cord, one category 5 cable, a driver cd, and a rather thin manual.

It seemed easy enough to set up, but with Windows networking (no Linux drivers are at the SMC site), nothing is ever 100%. If you have tcp/ip installed correctly on your machine, you should only encounter minor problems. Plug everything in and run the setup file from the included CD. The CD also includes printer driver to allow you to take advantage of network printing without the extra work of a server.

After installing the driver program, you access the router configuration tool via your web browser. The very first thing you should do is reset the admin password. Procrastinators are the people who are attacked successfully. The manual uses a 'choose-your-adventure' style that tells you to skip to the appropriate page for your flavor of net connection. Roadrunner was a snap to configure. @home requires the use a host name and PPPoE requires you to set up your username and password. Reboot the router (through the toolbox link, not manually) and renew the ip address on your PC. You should be all set. Installing the printer driver is a snap, too.

Not that you are back on the internet (hopefully) go to the SMC site and download the firmware upgrade. Again, it's a case of better safe than sorry. The little ugly box has quite a few features for a product of this price level. Most applications are easy to configure and the most common ones are selectable from a menu format. If you do online gaming, MSN gaming zone is one of the presets. If your file sharing application or gaming network is not listed, you may have to do a little detective work. Find out what port it sends on and what port it receives on and you can configure it manually. You can also set it to ignore ping requests, which stealths your computer a bit more.

The security it provides is quite good for the price. I ran Nmap www.insecure.org/nmap/ against it and it was unable to identify the Operating System via tcp/ip fingerprinting. That's an encouraging result, because the less that can be discovered about your machine remotely, the harder it is to attack.

The manual was slim and followed the aforementioned choose-your-own-adventure style. It did get the job done, although parts of it are unclear. One gets the feeling that it was written by an engineer during his lunch break. It outlines the basic process, but don't expect a lot of detail. I guess they assume a lot of people will contact support anyway, so why waste time on a huge manual.

The extra ethernet cable was nice. It also has a dialup networking jack, in case the cable goes out (a frightening thought). As mentioned before, it's not exactly a sexy looking product, but it is a router, so it's not a problem at all. Luckily for me, I did not have to brave the tech support, so I will have to give them an incomplete in that area.

All in all, an excellent deal.





Recommended: Yes