Rating: 
Summary: A real answer to a real problem
Review: I am not sure what all the others had problems with but my Linksys worked great out of the box. Setting it up I had an issue that was easily fixed by calling tech support,(only 5 min wait and worth it, the technician was very good). My laptop which will be connecting wirelessly was not connecting no matter what I tried. It turns out that you can't run wireless cards and ethernet cards (mine was built in} at the same time because the machine will always default to the ethernet card. Which is exactly what was happening. We removed the driver for the ethernet card and it began to work great right away. Everything else about the setup was fairly simple and went very smooth the directions were easy to understand. I especially liked the quick installation sheet which is what I used to setup with.I highly recommend this product and would buy it again if I had to do it all over. The distance of the wireless machine is really dependent on terrain. But for my two story house it was great. The only weak spot being downstairs in the opposite direction of the linksys base as far as I could go. However it still worked and was quite able to handle downloads even at the weakest point. You just can't go wrong till they come out with a new beakthrough in technology. But even then the prices will be to high in the beginning. For instance the new 802.11a is several hundred dollars more expensive then this machine. And for what you get I just don't need it. This is a winner. The newest version of the product is BEF11S4 VER 2. Many of the reviews done in this section were about the
BEF11S4 its the same model number but lacking the ver.2 after the BEF11S4. The newest version has fixed most of the bugs of the previous version. Good Luck!!! A very satisfied consumer
Rating: 
Summary: Impressive
Review: This unit accomodates both hard wired networks (up to 4 devices) and wireless networks (use the Linksys cards - others may not be compatible) and serves as a router and access point. Setting it up was incredibly simple (I updated the firmware right away) and the default settings worked perfectly with my cable (Road Runner) ISP. I did implement MAC cloning on advice from the Linksys website (a great source for info on configuring this for various DSL/cable ISPs) later just in case. This was easy with the web-based configuration software. You do have to know how your ISP works. I'm assuming I could not disable DHCP because Road Runner uses it. Since I couldn't give my machines static IP addresses, I sometimes have to change the port forwarding configurations depending on which IP address the router assigns each machine (we turn off the machines at night). You also need to reconfigure some of your internet software to work behind a firewall if they haven't been set that way all ready. And in some cases, I had to disable my personal firewalls (we use Sygate, AtGuard or Zone Alarm) for internet software to work (particularly FTP clients). The wireless range (we have 3 hard wired computers and a couple of wireless laptops) is not spectacular (50' radius) but adequate for our purposes. Would have appreciated some input from the manufacturer about effective placement of the unit for optimal wireless performance. If you're willing to do a little tweaking now and then and don't need extensive wireless range, this is a great all-purpose device.
Rating: 
Summary: Good product, bad tech support
Review: I am a network admin and have worked with routers before. It took a long time to set it up but once I did it worked very well. The range is great. I live in an all concrete house and my laptop upstairs has no problem getting the router downstairs and the signal is strong. I am having a connection problem of being able to browse from the desktop to the laptop. I explained in my question to tech support that firewall settings are fine, etc. The answer I got was, "You must disable your firewall to get it to work". I am not that ignorant. Never disable your firewall. If you know a lot about routers and such it is a good piece of equipment. If you don't, my experience with tech support at Linksys makes me believe the unexperienced should stay away from this router.
Rating: 
Summary: Linksys SUCKS
Review: I'm very much pissed off with this crap product LinkSys wireless-B router.
Gives me hell every week. Gets disconnected and it's very slow.
You sould call overseas for customer service and they answer you in an hour.
They can't speak English well and it gives you more stress.
I'm gonna through away this bull**** and buy another product.
Rating: 
Summary: Should have went with my first impression
Review: The best thing I can say about Linksys is their personal support team. They were very helpful when it came to replacing my router which was defective fresh out of the box.... except for the part where I had to pay for the shipping. A year later I wanted to do some advanced stuff like port forwarding and and connecting to my computer remotely. Boy was it a pain to get port forwarding working! In fact I never got it to work so I thought I might need a firmware upgrade. Well this is a huge problem with Linksys! Somehow I got linked to the BEFW11S4 v2/3 firmware upgrade page and did not notice. In my own erroneous fashion I went ahead and installed the wrong firmware, and what is worse is the software has no versioning checking! So I erroneously fried my router. This wrong version even made it such that you cannot set back to factory settings! So I am putting that all behind me and buying a netgear. Be careful when dealing with linksys, I hope you don't get burnt doing firmware upgrades.
Rating:
Summary: Really like this!!!
Review: Well I purchased this Router for my son's new laptop. It was very simple to install. I had ABSOLUTELY no problems doing so. The signal is exceptional too! My son can take his laptop to the next door neighbors house and still have a decent enough signal to go online. I think this is a great product and I have no regrets!!!!!
Rating:
Summary: Works fine with Apple computers
Review: This router is serving a cable connection at my uncle's house and has been for at least 1 year. The one Apple computer in his house (Powerbook G4 400) is the only computer that works consistently with it. The XP box his son has is constantly bringing down the whole system because the thing is a security seive. Anyway, sometimes this router spontaneously reverts to a slower connection speed, but this can be easily fixed from the Mac using the admin web page. THIS ROUTER WORKS FINE WITH APPLE COMPUTERS. People who say otherwise don't know what they are talking about.
Rating:
Summary: Don't Buy Version 4
Review: Linksys wants you to think all of the glowing BEFW11S4 reviews are talking about the same hardware. Unfortunately the quality in the current iteration of this router (Version 4) makes me worried about Linksys's future. Several years ago I bought version 2 of this router and was very happy with it. I also had a friend with version 1 that had worked well for him. So when I needed another one for myself I figured Linksys would be a good bet. I could not have been more wrong. Version 4 (If there is only one row of lights on the front it's after version 2) is the worst network hardware I have ever used. Out of the box it is obvious that this is not the same hardware as the previous versions and it becomes much more apparent when you actually try to use the thing. I never saw the router work for more than 30 minutes without hanging and forcing me to physically un-plug and plug in the router to get it to respond. From reading about other people's experiences it seems that this is a hardware defect or a firmware defect that has not been fixed in multiple releases over the last year. In fact new firmwares have actually introduced new problems so this router is just not worth the trouble. If you know you are getting a version 3 or earlier go for it, otherwise don't waste your time or your money.
Rating:
Summary: It answered my problem
Review: I bought this for my laptop and my playstation 2. So I could game online with the plastation (using a ethernet wire) and access the internet from my laptop wirelessly. Setting it up was "fairly" easy: I just followed the instructions and a couple of minutes later (I had to turn off the firewall so the program could work) the thing worked! I now play online with my PS2 and go to my laptop for any game hints I might need ^_^ So far I've had the thing for a couple of weeks and i haven't noticed any real problems except for a small visible lag when I download something on my laptop. It solved my problem, hopefully it'll solve yours too
Rating:
Summary: A reliable, feature-packed, bargain router.
Review: As a networking expert, I'm very pleased with this product. It's faster than my broadband connection, easy to use, feature rich, and I don't lose my signal anywhere in my apartment... for $40. I made two weekend technical support calls. I was connected within 5 minutes and they were reasonably knowledgeable. Most home users should buy "Wireless-B". Wireless-B is 11Mbps, Wireless-G is 54Mbps. Both are much faster than your 1Mbps broadband connection. For Internet use, there's no difference. Wireless-B is half the price. Make sure to enable the security features. WEP encryption is the most important - it prevents neighbors from borrowing your connection or watching what you browse on the web. Disabling SSID broadcasts and setting a unique SSID are also good steps.
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