b standard

I tried a different brand of wireless bridge and it didn't work from out of the box, so I returned it, I wont mention the name though because it could have been just a plain dead unit and all companies are guilty of having a couple bad apples.

So I went out and bought this D-Link bridge right away and I have to say it works great. The smartest thing to do is to plug it into your wired network with the ethernet cable and access the admin pages through a web browser. After that upgrade the firmware and set it up so it will communicate with your wireless network, (ie. SSID, WEP key, channel, etc.). After configuring it you can unplug it from the router and plug it into your PS2/XBox/Tivo/whatever has an ethernet port you want connected to your network. It is as easy as that.

Network hardware advertisements are chock full of plug and play claims. In most cases things come up automatically only in a perfect network. And any time you are trying to integrate a Playstation 2 into a mixed Mac and PC wireless network you are far from perfect.

After one struggle with the game connector created by the company that made all of the other non-Mac parts of my network, I was completely sure that my PS-2 was never going to see my cable connection in a million years. That one didn't do what it said it would do, took inordinate amounts of setup time and still didn't work right.

Sheer stubbornness convinced me to try an ethernet bridge as a second effort. I selected this D-link model, brought it up and, despite happily winking lights, refused to talk to anything - no matter what I plugged it into. Fearing I was facing the same insurmountable difficulty I relented, and read the manual.

Well, duh!! in about 10 minutes I discovered that the 810+ was using 192.168.0.30 as an address, and my subnet was set up for 192.168.1.x as the subnet. Using my portable, I disabled DHCP, changed the subnet and linked it directly to the 810+. Much to my surprise and delight, there was the administration screen, and I promptly changed the 810+'s subnet. I returned the portable to DHCP, reset the network (and detached the 810+, and there it was, live on the line.

The 810+ may be a bit cheaply made for it's price, but the simple fact is that I did get it to work with only a moderate amount of effort. It has a good management console built right in, a straightforward manual on CD and, above all, it does the job.

DO NOT BUY THIS! I am a proud owner of several good products from dlink. I am a not so proud owner of 3 bad 810+'s. The first one configured fine. I decided to upgrade the firmware on it, and it crahed, not taking any firmware. OK every once in a while you get a bad one, so I returned it for a second one. That one crashed when trying to apply my wep key. It wouldn't take any firmware after a reset. Begrudgingly I recieved a third one. Again, while entering my wep key it crashed and wouldn't take firmware. I spoke to level 1 and 2 tech support from dlink. They then passed me on to an engineer in their engineering dept. Nobody could explain why this kept crashing. User error was eliminated, I work in IT and this is an easy piece to configure, far from my first. Other bad hardware on my side was elininated because the third one was configured on a different pc, different cat 5 different nic, etc. It is a bad piece of equipment and I will be getting a linksys very soon.