» NETGEAR FWG114P ProSafe 802.11g Wireless VPN Firewall 4-Port 10/100 Switch with USB Server

NETGEAR FWG114P ProSafe 802.11g Wireless VPN Firewall 4-Port 10/100 Switch with USB Server Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: Finally have it working great!!
Comment: I am on my 3rd RMA with this device. I really love the functionality of this firewall, thus all of the RMA's. The main issue I was experiencing, was the wireless conneciton. The speed of the connection would fluctuate between 54Mbps and 1Mbps. And I would randomally get disconnected for some time until it would reconnect. I also am running the higest security settings one can run. Data encryption is WPA2-PSK. I have done some extensive research as to what could be causing this. Tech support is very poor. When you know more about their product then they do, do yourself a favor, and either demand for an RMA, or hang up and fix it yourself. Well, I got fed up and I did exactly that! I found some rumors that heat is causing the wireless issues. I cracked open the firewall and found that the broadcom IC(Wireless) was very hot at idle. When I was streaming video it got hotter. Well, that makes sense. Sad thing is that there are no heatsinks on it. I went to the store and purchased a VGA heatsink and slapped it on there. It runs much cooler, and my speed is stable. Best thing is that I don't have the disconnects as often. I generally get 1 disconnect/week. When I do experience them, I go into my site monitoring software, and I find that my firewall is still active and has a strong signal. I think it has to do with my wireless card in my laptop. It's a Dell, with the built-in WiFi. I'm sure I can drop down to WPA-PSK to help out, but I like the heightened security.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Network works--Print server fails with Dymo label printer
Comment: I chose this combination wireless router and USB print server because I needed both those functions and wanted to keep the equipment/wiring quantity down. However, the print server failed with our Dymo LabelWriter 400. This was unfortunate but not entirely unexpected. Printer compatibility is hit-or-miss with most of these.

I solved this problem with a separate Netgear USB Mini Print Server (Model PS121), which was reported to work by Dymo. Now we can print wirelessly to our laser and the LabelWriter.

Overall the functionality is fine. I think it compares favorably to my home network's Linksys WRT54G, though I would have simply bought another Linksys if I'd known up front that the integrated print server isn't compatible.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Good Wireless Router
Comment: I've been using this router for a couple of weeks now with no hitches. The wireless connection signal is very strong.

Setup was fairly easy and painless, but you should know this.....

I connected my Canon multi-functional printer, scanner, copier, fax unit into the router's USB port and all I can do is print. You also won't get any feedback from the printer, so when you hit "Print" the popup printing progress window tells you the printer isn't responding, but it's actually printing just fine. This is not a huge problem for me, as that's all I do from my laptop is print. Most of the time that's all I do with my printer from my desktop computer too. When I want to do something else from my desktop, I just swap the USB plug to the computer's USB port and back into the router when I'm done, nothing needs resetting. I consider it a minor inconvenience, but your mileage may vary.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Support is terrible; product doesn't entirely work as advertised
Comment: All the support guys are trained to be nice, but they are not trained on the technology and are useless. After 3 weeks of waiting, calling, waiting, escalating, waiting, escalating, waiting, referred to engineering, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting. The product does not actually work with ISDN as advertised and no one at Netgear support has ever heard of ISDN.

The device is really intended for a basic uncomplicated setup with Cable modem as the primary line and a regular modem as a dial backup or dial-in access method. For that, it seems OK.

But for me, I'm packing it up and returning it because it doesn't actually work. Big disappointment. Lots of frustration.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Worst Netgear product I've ever owned
Comment: I read all of the reviews before I bought this and figured that surely Netgear would fix all the problems that were mentioned. I was incredibly wrong. The now two year old problem of constantly dropping WAN connection is still prevalent. I had an FWG114PV2 and I upgraded it to the latest firmware and had no problems at all for about 2 hours. Then I had to reboot the router every 5 minutes for an hour. Then it went up a bit more to 15-20 minutes each hour and then back to around 5. The longest it ever held connection was a full 18 hours which I thought was sheer magic. During the longest period of connectivity was my heaviest use as well. Both my girlfriend and I work from home and we simply pounded the router with data due to the nature of our jobs. I remember only have Pidgin. PuTTY, and Firefox with 3 tabs open during nearly 6 hours of random WAN drops. I wasn't doing anything special if I was doing anything at all. Most traffic was simple IMing and SSH traffic and nothing more.

After that debacle, I downgraded to firmware 1.2_04 (second newest, nearly a year old at this point) and it was no better. I did the same testing as before: Pidgin, PuTTY, Firefox. The connection drops were less frequent but still happened multiple times an hour. At that point, I was completely fed up and promptly filled out an Amazon return. In total, I had this piece of junk for 1 week including the UPS pick-up to my apartment. It was only in use for 2 days and I didn't even get to test out the print server functionality but I too figured that it wouldn't work worth what this thing costs.

As a replacement, I dusted off my old WRT54GL that FON sent me nearly three years ago and flashed it with dd-wrt. Since then, the router has been rebooted two times by me and only had a dropped WAN connection once...when my DHCP lease renewed itself.

I gave this piece of junk 2 stars simply because the case is made of metal and not cheap plastic like the rest of consumer-level networking products.

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