Belkin N Wireless Router (F5D8233-4)

I have two PC's and one Mac in my house, and the instant I set up this router the PC's connected to it flawlessly and everything was great, but my MacBook had a similar problem as some other people complained about: it would lose connection frequently. After looking online, I only saw a bunch of people complaining about it and never telling anyone how to fix it. So, I installed the firmware update (you can find this at Belkin.com) and I haven't lost connection since!

If I had only PC's I would have given this router 5 stars due to how easy it is to set up, how strong the signal is, how easy it is to set up a password and etc, but I'm giving it 4 stars simply because I had to install updated firmware to get it to work properly with my Mac. In Belkin's defense though, it was very easy to update the firmware.

Short story: installed and configured the router, and discovered that I couldnt stay continuously connected for more than about 20 minutes. Firmware updates did not help. Different network cards, different client computers with different drivers did not help. Basically, its a lemon.

My old linksys router would kick me out about every 2 hours, which is why I was looking for a replacement router in the first place, so this was a giant leap -- just in the wrong direction.

Configuration was easy enough, but be aware that the idiots who built this thing designed it to show a banner page to anyone who can access your WAN IP that displays them the SSID in use, the MAC address of the router, the firmware version, etc., on the login page. Breathtakingly stupid.

For interest's sake, I have since returned this router to Amazon, and replaced it with a D-link DIR-655 (paired with a DWA-643 Express card) which performs flawlessly for me (even under...Read more

My Linksys WRT54G is a few years old, and suddenly last week it began dropping our connections constantly. Each drop required a complete recycle of the modem and router to get it working again, and then it would only work for another 5-30 minutes before dropping again. Obviously out of warranty, not to mention this is the second Linksys we've owned that ended up dying the exact same way, I decided to try a new company.

The Belkin set-up was so easy I found myself searching the box to make sure there weren't more instructions I was missing. I was never able to get Linksys working without calls to tech support, which is always a real PITA. After 5 minutes with the Belkin simple one-page instruction and install disc, we were live and ready to go. 3 of our computers run XP, and one is running Vista and there have been no connection issues with any of them.

I installed the router this morning, and have not experienced a single connection drop during the day...Read more