- Donald K. Taber "KNRover" (Wilmington, DE)
I gave the D-Link DIR-601 router a 4-star rating based the three most
important attributes: Price, ease of setup and performance. It was only
$20 at the time I purchased it, which seems less than the cost of the
materials to make it(!). Since this was my first experience with a
router in my home, I did a fair amount of research and found a lot of
not-so-good reviews on many more-to-MUCH-more-expensive routers. The
problem areas were invariably poor range and difficult installation. The
reviews on the DIR-601 were much better than most, which, combined with
price, is why I chose it.
Click To See The Price => Price
Click To See Where To Buy => Where to Buy ?
I can confirm that the reviews are accurate. Installation was extremely easy; the "wizard" worked perfectly on an XP computer. I do have some minor range issues, but fewer than those reported by some users of much more expensive routers. The router is in my home office in the BASEMENT of the house. The basement walls are 8" poured concrete and the router happens to be next to the north wall. If I take my Toshiba Win 7 laptop to any part of the house OUTSIDE the planes of the basement walls (the porch and the breakfast-room-extension off the kitchen), the signal strength can drop to as little as 2 out of 5 bars, and download speed can drop from 18-20Mbps to just under 4Mbps. But I'm pretty sure that NO router -- at any price -- would do significantly better if positioned in the same place. Everywhere INSIDE the planes of the basement walls -- even the bedrooms 2-stories up and farthest from the router -- I typically get 4-5 bars. There are times when it falls to 3 bars in one bedroom, but it's not consistently at that level, so the drop-off could be due to transient interference from other electronics (e.g., our three cordless phones or routers in homes near us). I'm virtually certain that I could improve the signal strength in the areas where it's low by positioning the router close to the basement ceiling and away from the walls. But doing that requires (a) a couple of very long Ethernet cables (impractical) or (b) a couple of power line Ethernet adapters (expensive) or (c) getting a repeater (also expensive).
I had one issue that I called D-Link's tech support about. Shields Up (Gibson Research's program that tests the status of the first 1056 ports on your computer) has always shown my desktop ports to be 100% "stealth" -- invisible to the Internet. After installing the router, it showed ports 0 and 1 as only "closed", not "stealth". I contacted D-Link support via e-mail and received a reply within a day asking me to call a support phone #, which I did. The call was answered immediately (no hold time), the technician (South Africa) was knowledgeable and resolved the issue during the call. Turns out Shields Up is measuring the status of the router, not my PC. This tech support experience was completely opposite to what I had been told about D-Link's support -- that it was slow and not very good. If I were rating their tech support, I'd give it 5 stars.
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