print servers and device servers

I have to say that I'm not at all impressed by this product. I originally got it because of its size (it's relatively small), and the fact that I have an older laser printer with a parallel port interface (HP LaserJet 6P).

My main problem with the product has been its unreliability to complete a print job. Whatever I send to the printer, I have about a 50% chance of actually seeing output. That drops to around 10%-20% if two or more jobs are being sent concurrently (what's the point of having a print server if one can't print more than one thing at a time?). I should note that this happens whether printing from Windows 2000, OS X or Linux (lpr or CUPS).

My hunch is that printer support is iffy, but one is hard pressed to find out from NetGear which printers work and which don't. Unfortunately experimentation is often the only route. I'm pretty sure the printer is fine, as when I use a computer to share the printer (via printer sharing), I never lose a job and everything works well.

Losing jobs wouldn't be such a pain if all printing was done from the same room as the printer (since it would be easy to tell when something needed to be printed again). However, in our household, we have two wireless laptops, and it's a pain to have to always walk into the office to make sure the print job got through right away rather than just being able to rely on it getting done to be picked up later.

Another complaint I have is that the unit seems to lose its configuration quite regularly. I find that if I power cycle it, I have about a 20% chance that it will reset to factory defaults. This is a pain for me, since I print from OS X and Linux which both like to have a static IP for the printer. When the unit resets, it loses its IP address, and all of a sudden I can't find the printer.

The only reason I didn't give this product one star is because when it doesn't lose my print job and actually retains its configuration, it actually works semi-well.

Overall, if you're like me, and you don't like constantly tweaking, prodding, goading, etc. to get something to work, or you might be printing from outside the immediate vicinity of the printer, I would spend the extra money and desk space and get something that works reliably.

I have bought this print server for about a year, and it brought me nothing but anger and frustration every time I wanted to print something.

First of all, you could not just send your print out to the server. You had to ping it first to "wake it up." Otherwise, it wouldn't respond to the client.

Then, sometimes even pinging wouldn't work. The server responded to ping but I still couldn't print. The client on my PC kept telling me that there wasn't a server. Rebooting the server or my PC would not always work.

Worse, often when I tried to use their tools, trying to "shack up" something (there weren't sufficient tools in the first place), the tools sometimes crashed and the server port disappeared from my PC. I had no way to get the port back, but to uninstall and install the thing again.

Do not buy it. If you really want it, I am selling it cheap.

Having read the reviews of this product (and seeing little competition) I decided to give the PS101 a try. I have a machine running XP & a Mac with OS X 10.3 so I figured that once the device was setup by the windows machine the Mac would just need the right settings--wrong. The setup on XP was tricky & confusing, but did indeed work. I have a Brother HL-1250 (great printer) that isn't a native OS X printer. I couldn't get the IP Printing settings to take the brother as default. As per another review on this product, Mac printing is possible (theoretically) with the right printer. Be careful with this product...