D-Link 4-Port Wireless-G 54Mbps Router

 (94 customer reviews)

I got this item for "free" as a promotion. Free, it's not, having cost me literally hours of troubleshooting. I have installed the latest firmware, 1.04 A1.

1) Hangs up for minutes at a time, seemingly randomly. You have to power cycle, or wait and it MAY recover.

2) Randomly won't let you log in, keeping you at the login screen. Have to power cycle, or reset to factory settings. In the latter case, you lose all your settings. This bug is reported consistently in forums you can find with a web search.

3) Many features are incompatible with wireless clients that work perfectly with other wireless routers. WEP and WPA would not work with two of my wireless cards. Auto Channel Scan fails in conjunction with WEP. It took a full afternoon of experimentation to discover which features are compatible with each other and with various clients. In the end, I had to use MAC filtering to enable any type of security that would work for all clients.

5)...Read more

I thought I got a great deal on this from a big name electronics store (won't say who). I needed something to connect my G5 iMac and my PS2. I bought it, brought it home and set it up on my lunch break and STILL made it back on time (1 hour total). I was very impressed with myself. I set up all the encryption and security features, and changed all the default names/pw's. It worked great, so I left to go back to work. When I got home 5 hours later it was still going strong. BUT then it started needing to be reset (the router) every couple hours because it just "lost" connection with my iMac. No big deal, I'll just have to reset it a couple times a day. It only takes 20 seconds to reset. BUT NOW, only 2 days later, the wireless function barely works, and the biggest problem is that no matter what I set the settings too, they change on their own almost instantly to some network name I have never entered, with all the security features turned off. This all seemed to happen...Read more

This particular router, with the latest firmware (v1.02 beta as of right now), is running fine for me. However, a friend of mine has the same one, and it cannot even run one night without crashing. Said friend isn't as computer-literate as I am and doesn't know too much about fixing router unreliability, so I'm the one who ends up doing it most of the time. And let me tell you, I would not recommend this router to anyone. Although mine's been reliable, something "disagrees" with his internet setup (could be the difference in broadband connection - I'm running Comcast cable with a Motorola modem, whereas he's got SBC DSL with a Siemens modem) and it can't go four or so hours without crashing, necessitating a reboot. The lack of reliability on the part of this piece of junk is appalling. Even after installing an 80mm fan on the router to cure any potential overheating problems (voiding the warranty in the process), the crashing still persists. So I've pretty much determined that...Read more