wired routers

After reading the reviews of this router, I was a little nervous purchasing it for a friend of mine. He specifically wanted printer server capabilities and many of the reviewers stated they had problems with getting the print server to work correctly and/or reliably. Other routers with print servers were $50-$100 more expensive (and reviews also indicated various problems printing), so we decided to purchase this one from Fry's electronics, confident that we could return if it had problems. I have one of SMC's original routers (the 7004WBR - with a parallel port print server) and it's worked reliably for the last 3.5 years ( I paid ~$299 for it back then, the price of early adoption).

My friend also wanted to go wireless with 2 notebook PC's, so we also purchased two SMC wireless cards. One of the notebook PC's was a relatively new Dell Inspiron, while the other was an old IBM A20 with just 128M RAM, 10G HD and a ~500 MHz CPU. Both the Dell and amazingly, the IBM had Windows XP running.

Installation of the router was fast and easy. Per the quick start manual, I installed the software from the CD, then checked the "wired" capability to the Dell. I was able to log into the router and check the settings. I did not change anything from the default (including security) before installing the wireless cards. Those too went quick. I was surprised there were no real problems with either PC. One reboot later and both notebook were wireless. I enabled some of the security features (WPA, discard pings from WAN, MAC Address filtering) and left the rest untouched.

The last task to do was to install and configure the print server. I had to pull up the full manual for this as I remember the process was involved for my old SMC router. This is not in the quick start guide. Following the instructions word for word, I set up the print server. Several "wizards" and related windows come up during the process, but manual is pretty easy to follow. My friend had a HP deskjet 940c, which was on of the many HP printers on the list. In fact, the list of "configurable" printers seemed very comprehensive. We printed a few documents without problems. The printer seems to print the last page first now, but otherwise worked fine. I set up both computers to print to the SMC print server and tested several documents. No problems.

Some reviews have mentioned reliability and the need for reboots as a problem. Well I cannot say one way or another as I just installed it, however my older SMC 7004 WBR has lasted almost 4 years with no reliability problems.

I gave it 5 stars because after only about 1 hour of setup I had both computers wireless and using the SMC print server without any problems at all. My friend was very impressed. I showed him some "cool" multimedia links (www.ifilm.com) and we watched a few movie trailers wirelessly from the kitchen. He was impressed and very thankful.

I'll update the review if I get a "support" call from him.

Strangely, printing seemed to work OK for me for a couple months. Then it died. Now, it prints about the top 2" of any documents and then printing stops. Sometimes the router needs to be rebooted to regain Internet access, but sometimes not.

I've tried upgrading firmware, to no avail -- even including some of the beta firmware versions floating around.

Otherwise, seems to be an OK router. But don't count on this baby as a print server.

I decided to purchase this product even though the reviews were not that great. I previously owned a SMC7004AWBR and had no problems, so with that it seemed logical that I would buy SMC again. I think most people that have complained are just regular complainers or just don't know how to properly configure a router.