D-Link DWL-926 108mpbs Broadband Router and PCMCIA card bundle.

12:21.01 - Friday 3rd June 2005   (Link to This Entry)

£99.99 in-store, PC World, Grimsby

The D-Link DI-614+ I've been using for the past few years has finally given up the ghost and gone to the great electronics dump in the sky. After the power went off unexpectedly a couple of weeks ago, the bios/memory/whatever seemed to go completely screwy. We got it working again eventually, but on Wednesday night it conked again, and now won't even power up.

Because I work from home I didn't really have the luxury of being able to take my time choosing a replacement. Instead, I got into work (My other job) just before 9am on Thursday and took a quick shufty around the PCWorld website, setting on the D-Link DI-624/DWL-G650 combo for £99.99. M was despatched and came home victorious, and I gave it my attention on Thursday night.

The most immediate difference between the old router and the new is the physical size of the device itself. The new unit is half the volume of the old one, measuring approximately 30x195x120mm as opposed to 35x240x160mm, and it more like a paperback book compared to a hardback - it looks positively tiny alongside the 120GB Buffalo Linkstation. The same lights are present albeit smaller, and there's only one antenna on the back where the old router has two.

Setup was a doddle, of course. Plug it in and the DI-624 takes the default IP address of 192.168.0.1 - exactly how I had my network set up in the first place. All that remained was to restart the cable modem and Bob's you uncle - I was back up and connected five minutes after opening the box. I probably spent more time getting the thing unpacked and wired into the LAN then I did getting everything back online.

Unfortunately, the same annoying feature remains that bugged me with the previous router. If you save the router configuration out to disk, you cannot load it into a different firmware version. This is especially useless because you lose all of the router's configuration when you upgrade the firmware, and so there's no way to migrate your settings. It only takes one upgrade, after spending an hour getting your firewall rules working, so make you realise just how annoying this is.

I wish D-Link would give this their utmost attention, I really do. Most likely they're simply dumping out a portion of the router's flash memory (it's a .bin file, after all) since it's the simplest approach. What In wish they'd do is implement some kind of .ini file, or even an XML approach, so that the saved file could be parsed and read back in by a newer version of the firmware.

All of the regular features are there as before - firewall and filters, content blocking, support for Dyndns.ord hostnames and NTP time updates. Pretty much everything is as you've come to expect with a D-Link router. The major difference, of course, is that this box is a double-pumped 802.11g unit, giving 108mbps wireless as opposed to the older unit's 22mpbs, which was double-pumped 802.11b.

*UPDATE*
Hold the phone people, hold the gosh-darned phone! Wireless works like a champ on this unit, but another problem has surfaced that has basically cost D-Link a customer. I'm now on my second DI-624 and it's going back to PC World first thing because the damned thing won't stay connected. Here's a couple of links that tell you everything you need to know - the router continually drops the connection and even reboots, anything from several times a day to several times a minute.

In my case, the problem has appeared both on the original unit and on its replacement, rendering World of Warcraft completely unplayable since I get connected, disconnect and then spend a minute trying to get back in because 'a character with that name already exists'. Duh! Obviously it's not going to be every unit that is affected, but for me to get two of them from the same shop... well that just goes to show how widespread the problem is. I have printed out the choice quotes from that first link and will be advising staff at PCW to drop the units until they're fixed. In the meantime, I'm avoiding D-Link and I'll be looking for an alternative brand tomorrow.

Ease of Use: 8/10
Value for Money: 5/10
Reliability: 3/10
Overall: 5/10

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