FireNet

Rating:
Summary: Buyer Beware: Not Ready For Primetime
Review: I just spent one of the most frustrating afternoons of my life trying to get two Dell computers (one running Win98SE, the other XP Home) to talk to each other using a firewire connection and the demo version of this software (which only works for 30 minutes). Have you ever tried to set up and troubleshoot a new network from sratch in under 30 mins, let alone an "emulated" one!? Good luck. And every time I was forced to reboot, I'd get radically different results.

The good folks at UniBrain still have a lot of work to do with this product. Maybe if they had DuelBrains, they would've developed a bug-free, workable solution before dumping it on an unsuspecting public. Save yourself the ulcers, my friends.

Rating:
Summary: FireWire
Review: i purchased this product recently and i connected my 3 stations at home.I am using WinXP , Windows 2000 and the third computer has Windows Millenium.The setup was very fast and i didnt have any problems with the cards OR the software.

I give a 4 star rate because the setup needs a bit of networking knowledge but if you get it the speeds are really high.

Rating:
Summary: It doesn't work
Review: I spent 2 hours trying to connect XP and W2K machines using FireNet with no luck. I eventually gave up, since it's not worth the hassle.

Rating:
Summary: Fast networking
Review: I tried the demo version of Firenet before I purchased and found it to be so much faster then my Ethernet network that I've now go my home systems all on Firenet. The time savings on file transfer has been outstanding, esp. with all the audio and video files I have! Our gaming sesions have even noticed an improvement in lag with Firenet.
I can't rate it a 5 as the setup did require that I know something about networks, however after a email to their support I was able to complete the install and do my testing.

Rating:
Summary: Whoa!!! Lightning speed!!! DV users need this!!!
Review: If your doing Digital Video and transporting files between computers than you need this. As you know DV files are huge and transfer time takes away from development time. The less time you spend transferring files (i.e. burning DVDs & CDs, Ethernet, whatever) the more time you can be creative and in tight production schedules this is invaluable. My first transfer (after hours of trying to get it to work, more on that later) was a 738MB Avi and it transferred in about 41 seconds, that's 18MB/sec or 144Mb/sec. Whoa!!! All I can say is that I'm happy.

Now the reason for 4 stars and not 5 is probably due to my little to no knowledge of networking. I followed the instructions and the install went smoothly. I had a connection and everything, but for the life of me I could not get the Windows XP and Windows 2000 Workgroup to function correctly. They could see each other but I would always get a permissions type of error. After many hours of trying this and trying that from posts on newsgroups about workgroups in windows I finally just called the support line and Greg had me up and running in 10 minutes. He just had me Map a network drive on both machines and like magic it worked. If you'r having trouble do this:

-assign IP addresses 192.168.10.1 and 192.168.10.2 to the other.
-be sure you can ping the ip addresses (be sure to shutdown zonealarm on both machines ->right click system tray icon)
-open windows explorer, tools->Map Network Drive
In folder type \\"ip address"\"folder name"
for example \\192.168.10.2\shared-folder
-be sure the folder is shared and you're good to go.

I mentioned to Greg that maybe they should include this in the pdf file that comes with the download. Hopefully they'll update it.

Rating:
Summary: Whoa!!! Lightning speed!!! DV users need this!!!
Review: If your doing Digital Video and transporting files between computers than you need this. As you know DV files are huge and transfer time takes away from development time. The less time you spend transferring files (i.e. burning DVDs & CDs, Ethernet, whatever) the more time you can be creative and in tight production schedules this is invaluable. My first transfer (after hours of trying to get it to work, more on that later) was a 738MB Avi and it transferred in about 41 seconds, that's 18MB/sec or 144Mb/sec. Whoa!!! All I can say is that I'm happy.

Now the reason for 4 stars and not 5 is probably due to my little to no knowledge of networking. I followed the instructions and the install went smoothly. I had a connection and everything, but for the life of me I could not get the Windows XP and Windows 2000 Workgroup to function correctly. They could see each other but I would always get a permissions type of error. After many hours of trying this and trying that from posts on newsgroups about workgroups in windows I finally just called the support line and Greg had me up and running in 10 minutes. He just had me Map a network drive on both machines and like magic it worked. If you'r having trouble do this:

-assign IP addresses 192.168.10.1 and 192.168.10.2 to the other.
-be sure you can ping the ip addresses (be sure to shutdown zonealarm on both machines ->right click system tray icon)
-open windows explorer, tools->Map Network Drive
In folder type \\"ip address"\"folder name"
for example \\192.168.10.2\shared-folder
-be sure the folder is shared and you're good to go.

I mentioned to Greg that maybe they should include this in the pdf file that comes with the download. Hopefully they'll update it.

Rating:
Summary: Fast and cheap! Beats Ethernet hands down
Review: This is an impressive product. Assuming that you have Firewire
ports on your PC's (and most high end machines do, or buy a cheap PCI card) Firenet beats Ethernet (10/100)hands down.
Great for video transfers and gaming. The set-up is a bit of a hassle, otherwise 5*