Rating: 
Summary: Easy as cake!
Review: So I got DSL through SBC (wonderful service, BTW) and since there's 3 computers in my home we decided to pick up a router. I mostly grabbed the Netgear over Linksys due to the name and the not so great history Linksys has compared to Netgear's historically stellar quality. This thing is great, works right out of the box (if you have Cable, DSL you need to give it your username and password for DSL) and should take you less than 3 minutes to set up including waiting for it to boot up. I haven't reset it in months and she's been doing great... highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Easy as cake!
Review: So I got DSL through SBC (wonderful service, BTW) and since there's 3 computers in my home we decided to pick up a router. I mostly grabbed the Netgear over Linksys due to the name and the not so great history Linksys has compared to Netgear's historically stellar quality. This thing is great, works right out of the box (if you have Cable, DSL you need to give it your username and password for DSL) and should take you less than 3 minutes to set up including waiting for it to boot up. I haven't reset it in months and she's been doing great... highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Netgear Still Works The Best (Over D-Link, Linksys, & SMC)
Review: Take it from a guy who tried all 4 brands of network routers: Netgear, D-Link, Linksys, & SMC, and guess what... Netgear still works the best!You might pay a little more for Netgear's components, but its well worth the money: First, I've had the product over 2 months now, on 24/7 and I never had to turn off or power-cycle the router. D-Link, Linksys, and SMC all froze after 2 week's of continuous use. And every week I had to repeat the power-cycle process. Second, I never had to reboot to access the Internet whenever I reconfigure the router And last, simple to use (no Fuss)!
Rating:
Summary: Netgear Still Works The Best (Over D-Link, Linksys, & SMC)
Review: Take it from a guy who tried all 4 brands of network routers: Netgear, D-Link, Linksys, & SMC, and guess what... Netgear still works the best! You might pay a little more for Netgear's components, but its well worth the money: First, I've had the product over 2 months now, on 24/7 and I never had to turn off or power-cycle the router. D-Link, Linksys, and SMC all froze after 2 week's of continuous use. And every week I had to repeat the power-cycle process. Second, I never had to reboot to access the Internet whenever I reconfigure the router And last, simple to use (no Fuss)!
Rating: 
Summary: Locks Up Several Times a Day, with Moderate Use
Review: There are several other choices in this market, and if I were buying a router again (which I may have to do), I would stay far away from the RP 114. Ours locks up several times a day, with three people using it. Typically, if one of us is connecting to a web server that is down, it hangs the entire router for a few minutes, or longer. We then have to continually reset it. REALLY annoying. I don't want to have to think about a router several times a day; it should work in the background, but this one doesn't.
Rating:
Summary: BE AWARE: Netgear Customer Support is Non-Existent
Review: Think twice or three times before buying NetGear products. If you have any problems at all, you are simply on your own. You cannot get a live technician on the line, they automatically disconnect you after being on hold for an hour. The web support is equally bad, after a week I still have not received an answer to my "case". Only correspondence I got from them was a survey to see how "satisfied" I was with the customer service. All in all, customer support is a disaster. In this day and age, that is inexcusable.
Rating:
Summary: Netgear Equals Superb Service
Review: This holiday season I was a good santa and purchased numerous wireless networking products for my various family members. Sure it was partially a selfish act as I wanted to be able to easily connect when I went to visit, but for the most part it was just an act of giving. I purchased mainly G products and they varied from routers to USB adapters to PC Card adapters. I did also purchase a couple of B products for those in the family that already had some wireless networking products (yes, I know they are backwards compatible but I didn't want to take any chances).
Only two members of the family had installation problems (considering my family is very non-technical I was quite impressed) and those two people both had yet to upgrade to Windows XP SP2. The rest of the family members were up and running within minutes.
As for the couple of family members that did have problems, well they called me first (of course) and I told them to just run back through the installation procedure again. This solved the problem for Uncle Dennis but Grandma Joyce still couldn't get it to work properly. I reluctantly told her to call Netgear's technical support (hey the reviews on Amazon haven't been too pretty for their tech support). I however was quite pleased when an hour later I got an email from Grandma Joyce thanking me for the great gift. I called her back and she told me that after fiddling with the settings with the Netgear people she was up and running within 30 minutes.
Overall, I consider this the ultimate test of product quality and support and I would give Netgear two thumbs up.
I hope this review was helpful to you in putting your mind at ease regarding ease of setup and trust of technical support if needed.
Rating: 
Summary: a computing fan
Review: This is the road I took to finally being able to stay with this router. I have a tendency of being really indecisive when buying things. I bought the RP114 and returned it and got the Linsys BEFSR41, then returned it and got the RP114 again. If you have a choice of between RT114, RT314, RP114 then get the RP114 because it's the newer model and is functionally the same as the RT114 plus more. RT314 will likely be discontinued. What I like:
The RP114 has a solid construction made of metal. It feels solid and durable in my hands, unlike the Linksys model, which is made of plastic. Of course, this doesn't really say much, but I like my hardware to have some weight to it. Plus, the 4 little rubber feet (?) at the base of the router is well balanced and helps it from moving around too much. The Linksys wasn't balanced at all. It kept rocking back and forth because one of the rubber feets were higher than the other. What I also like about this router is that it's got little holes on the bottom of the router so that you can mount it on the wall. My desk is really cluttered from zip drive to palm docking station to left over food to you name it. And the wall mounting feature really saves me valuable space and helps keep it in place without much movement.
It has a Link/Activity indicator, for each of four LAN ports and the WAN port. It also has a 100 BaseT indicator to show whether the NIC is connected at 100 Mbps to the router (of course, they are auto-sensing 10/100 BaseT). The unit is firmware upgradable. It also has Content Filtering where you can enter up to 255 keywords. If someone tries to bring up a web page or url contain these keywords it'll display a message saying that this page is blocked. Albeit it seems a very simple thing, I really like that it displays a message saying that it's blocked instead of the web page just hanging and not showing anything, making the user think that something is wrong with the router. It's very useful if you have children and want to control what they can and can't view! You can also log these access and have it scheduled to send an email to a user. The following two were the deciding factors for me. I used to share my internet connection through a regular dial up connection with ICS before I got my cable modem connection. Thus, I bought myself a 50 ft cross-over cable. I was delighted to find out that the LAN ports on the RP114 are able to distinguish between the two different types of cables (MDI/MDI-X)! So I just used my old cross-over cables and didn't have to hand over another $30 or so on a new 50 ft cable.
The second deciding factor was the high configurability of the router. I like the web interface to configure the system, but you can also telnet into the router and do so much more! What I don't like & Wish list:
The only reason it doesn't deserve 5 stars are as follows. I don't know if it's just me or not, but I really like having a printed manual. The unit ships with practically no printed manual. It comes with a one page Installation Guide. All the other manuals are on the CD in PDF or HTML. This shortcoming probably isn't something I can blame Netgear for, because this is the nature of the beast -- NAT routers work by allowing multiple computers to share a single IP address. When I use IRC, the server checks my IDENTD server. I can use port forwarding on port 113 (?) to make it connect to the built in IDENTD server in MIRC, which is fine and dandy, but I have to always have either MIRC with IDENTD server running, or run a separate IDENTD server on my machine. This is fine, too, except I share my connection with my brother and he gets the same user@host as me, because port forwarding only fetches the first entry in its list and uses that for all the computers. This can be problematic because some servers don't let multiple instances on their servers. This means a specific port number can only be assigned to one machine. If me and my brother both run a FTP server on port 21, it will ALWAYS be forwarded to the first entry in the port mapping. This is okay when we are in control of what port number to use, but in cases like IRC and IDENT, all the server seems to connect to port 113, so this is out of the clients' control. I think this would also be a problem with sending files over Instant Messenging programs and DCC in IRC. I remember Linksys had something to overcome this (not entirely sure?), but it wasn't working correctly for some reason. It would have been nice to have a work around for this. Bottom line:
From practical use, I've had no problems whatsoever save for the minor annoyance with the port mapping and server port sharing. I haven't had to reset the router yet for any reason, and my status page shows my uptime to be 1104 hours (46 days). I'd highly recommend this router to anyone looking for a home router to share broadband.
Rating:
Summary: GLR - great little router
Review: This little box did just what I wanted. I needed to create a home dsl lan for my pc's and macs. The installation took just minutes, and even a tech five thumbs like myself could get it connected to my ISP with no problem. I had the dsl lan up and working within 30 mins of breaking open the box. The only problem is that the ac power lead and port connections are on OPPOSITE sides of the box - duh not too convenient. Oh well a small price to pay for something that actually works out of the box first time!
Rating:
Summary: Excellent, easy to install Router
Review: This router is an excellent choice for establishing a home or small business network. I have extensive experience with computer hardware, but this was my first experience with setting up a home network. I looked at this router and the Linksys BEFSR41, and ended up going with the Netgear. I'm very glad that I did. Reviews of both routers complain about customer service. I wouldn't know how Netgear's customer service is because I never had to call them. I was setting up a network with three computers, all running XP. Withing fifteen minutes of taking the router out of the box, all three machines were hooked to the network and working flawlessly. I used the setup instructions that came with the router, which told me everything I needed to do. Installation was a breeze, it quite simply couldn't have been any easier. I have been running it now as an "always on" network for over a month, and it has never frozen or locked up; I have not had to reboot or reset it a single time. My only complaint is the orientation of the plugs. All the network connections are on the front of the box, while the power jack is on the back, which makes it hard to put anywhere on a desk. But this objection is cosmetic and nit-picky. However, the outside of the unit is made of metal and is very sturdy. Overall, it is a very competitively priced router that doesn't necessarily have all the bells of whistles of other models, but it is very dependable and good at what it does. If you're looking for a nice priced, very dependable router for home or small business networks, pick this little guy up today.
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