pc cards

I had this product up and running in about 15 minutes. I am using the device wirelessly with WEP encryption. I did have to disable my firewall during the setup process. It was annoying to have to approve every action the software was taking during setup. Ran into a problem using it, once I went from using the Ethernet port connection to wireless, because I re-enabled my firewall. Over came this by adding a static IP address to the device and then allowing that address access through the firewall. The device does everything advertised. I even have it pulling music from 3 different PC's on my network. Upgrades I would recommend to Linksys include:
1. Optical output
2. Enhanced scrolling through folders
3. Display of album art
4. Ability to play video
5. Component video output
6. Upgrade to 802.11g

I've been waiting for a solution like this to allow me to access my music libraries stored on my computer from my home stereo in a different part of the house. But I didn't want to setup another network, I wanted something that worked directly over an existing 802.11b network. I also thought a TV interface was a good idea for navigating a large library.

I considered some other products, but was always turned off by the lack of detailed product information at the manufacturer web sites, or bizarre configuration requirements. I downloaded the user guide from the Linksys web site before making my decision to purchase this, and could see that this was just what I wanted.

I was able to point it to my music collection, and it was instantly available for selection via the TV interface. Manually tracking down the directory where MusicMatch stores its playlist files was a minor challenge, but it works great with those playlists as well. And the sound quality is very good. It also does a great job displaying pictures from my digital camera.

I'm only giving it 4 stars instead of 5, mainly because the installation was a challenge. The installation software couldn't find the device on the wireless network, so I had to hook it up with an ethernet cable to initially configure the device. I used the setup utility to configure the settings that I wanted for the device, and it kept reporting an error that it could not save the settings. I eventually realized that despite the error, the settings were being saved, and continued. Once I realized that the configuration settings were being saved, it came up on the wireless network just fine (needed to change default of "adhoc" mode to "infrastructure" mode). But then the software that runs on the PC would not install. No errors were reported, just a link on the desktop pointing to a missing file that was nowhere to be found on my hard drive. After several attempts, I was about to call tech support when I decided to reboot first, after which the install then worked properly.

It would be nice if the install had an option to scan your hard drives for music and picture files, and then gave you the option to select the directories to include from the ones that were found, rather than requiring manual selections. But the manual selection approach was probably better for me personally.

Now that it is installed, I'm quite happy with it. I've only been using it for about 6 hours, but the user interface is good. The "shuffle" mode for a playlist doesn't seem to work quite like I expect (the first song in the playlist is always first even in "shuffle" mode, and there doesn't seem to be a way to reshuffle the playlist once it is loaded), but other than that it is working quite well. I think I'm going to be very happy with it. I'm optimistic that now that the installation challenges are done that it will work its way up to 5 stars from my current 4 rating.

i did not expect i would be writting this review for this product. my initial experience was very good and the product performed as advertised. Unfortunately some where along the line the software suffered the same fate as other customers. that is the client software crashes and refuses to run under xp pro. the online tech support is useless and the fact pages clearly are not addressing this problem. it makes the product useless and a nice paper weight. for background i have tried re-installing the software and .net many times to see if i could fix the problem (by the way the uninstaller also crashes so this is a manual process) with no success. i really like linksys products as they are doing some neat stuff but it is clear they are having some real technical support issues. make sure you can get a refund if you buy this product!