NOOK HD Tablets-Now with Google Play
"Mostly works..."
Pros
Speed as advertised, USB sharing works
Cons
Clunky interface, Wireless connection dies regularly
Summary
I bought this router to replace a Linksys » WRT54GC and a D-Link 2310, both of which worked OK but had occasional reliability issues. The Asus looked good, was "N" ready and had USB ports that permit sharing a hard drive, a printer, or even a web cam. 1st impression was ... Read full review
I bought this router to replace a Linksys » WRT54GC and a D-Link 2310, both of which worked OK but had occasional reliability issues. The Asus looked good, was "N" ready and had USB ports that permit sharing a hard drive, a printer, or even a web cam. 1st impression was good. I managed to get a printer working and a USB hard drive was readable. WiFi worked great with TKIP encryption on a mixed B and G network (the PDA is still B).
Then the bad news. USB drives must be formatted FAT32 or use a Linux partition in order to be writable. I don't have Linux and could not find a utilty to format my drive with partitions bigger than 32 GB... so formatted it Fat32 with 3 partitions. Next, it turns out that you can't share the drive without setting up user accounts on the router. OK. Did that. Now it works and both computers can mount, read, and write to all 3 partitions. The password protected user accounts that I HAD to set up, don't appear to actually DO anything. So I can't share the drive without setting up user accounts, but once they are set up they don't actually provide password protection or account differentiation. I have 3 printers.
1) A networked Samsung laser printer, so no need to connect it to a USB port.
2) An HP inkjet/scanner all-in-one which I connected to the USB port
3) A Canon 4x6 photo-printer which I connected to a USB port
Results: HP printing worked, but no other features work over the network, so need to disconnect from the router and reconnect to a PC in order to scan. The Canon photo printer could not be made to work over the network.
I saved the best (worst) for last. The place that I bought the router has a 1 week DOA or exchange policy. After about 9 days and two firmware upgrades, I realized that the Wireless component is completely unreliable. Wireless simply stops working on regular basis. The WiFi radio stops broadcasting completely. Logging in over ethernet and restarting or resetting has no effect. The only way to get the WiFi radio to broadcast again is to unplug the router from the power supply and power it up again. Sometimes this has to be done more that once. And then, even when it works, there is no telling how long until the WiFi radio decides it's tired and needs to rest again.
Anybody want to buy a really cool router?
