For some reason, when I purchased my Macbook Pro with 802.11n enabled, my Belkin N-1 basestation had poor wireless connectivity with the machine. I couldn’t really figure it out. I changed some settings, but nothing seemed to be acceptable. It was unusual because I had an AppleTV connected via 802.11n as well and it seems to work just fine. I decided that I would try another basestation and see if my luck would change. Since I’m a big Apple fan, I decided I would give it a try. I was looking for something that had decent features, was easy to configure, and I was interested in the AirDisk and print sharing capabilities.

I picked up one of the Apple Airport Express units when I purchased the Logitech Audiostation Express. I wanted to stream music from my laptop to the speaker wirelessly and I knew this would do the job. Its been out for a while, and with Apple updating its Airport Extreme basestation to 802.11n technology, it’s only a matter of time until this product is replaced.

My internet connection had become very flaky. I first thought my Netgear WPN824 was dying on me. I had thought that it was always disconnecting and I always had to reset it. I was just getting fed up and decided to go purchase a new router. I read a few reviews and decided to go with the Belkin N1 Wireless Router. After using it for a while, I’m beginning to think it’s my Comcast Cable internet that is disconnecting and not the router.

A couple months back I was looking for a good all around network router, preferably with both wired and wireless capabilities. After some research, I came upon the D-Link DGL-4300. It is touted as a “Gaming Router”, which basically means it has QOS (Quality Of Service). For those who don’t know, it is a configuration that gives priority to certain network traffic, but more on that later. Along with some other nice features the wired 4-port gigabit switch made this router stand out from the rest.

I was looking for a wireless solution for my living room. I was in the process of setting up a Netgear WPN824 as my primary router and it did a good job of covering the entire apartment. Wired Ethernet really wasn’t an option for me because I was renting the apartment and didn’t want Ethernet cables running along the baseboard of my rooms. I was then considering putting wireless network cards in each of the units in my entertainment system. All the wireless cards were platform specific and if I ever upgraded any of my equipment I would have to purchase a wireless card in each additional item. Since all the equipment I was looking to connect had a built in Ethernet port as well as any future equipment I looked into a wireless bridge. In my opinion, this was the most cost effective solution to my problem. Since I already had Netgear equipment and I was happy with it I went and purchased the Netgear WGPS606, which has a built in print server and 4 Ethernet ports and the ability to bridge two wireless networks.

I’ve always been interested in ways of getting my large music collection off my computer and into a decent component stereo setup. Throughout college it was consisted of running a 20 foot mini jack to RCA’s cable from my sound card to the stereo inputs. After college the mini jack to RCA cable just didn’t cut it when I had a real office with the computer and a real living room with the stereo setup. Enter the need for a music streaming device. After a short period of research I selected the Roku setup. It seemed to support everything I wanted to do and was capable of running digital outs along with the standard RCA. I did like the concept of Sonos, especially their color remote. Unfortunately their setup did not include any digital outs (even at the time of writing this article).