Category: Netgear

  • Assembling a network storage server from spare bits

    I have a pile of old hard drives sitting in an attic closet gathering dust — but out of the hands of identity thieves, not polluting the water supply and generally staying out of trouble. So when I saw a diskless version of the Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ super-cheap, I decided to buy it and conduct…

  • Getting Verizon’s Actiontec to play with Airport Express and Remote App

    (Updated 5/13/2010) With Apple’s new Remote App for the iPhone and iPod Touch, the teeming masses who couldn’t afford hyper-expensive schemes (cough – Sonos – cough) to connect their digital music collections to their stereos suddenly had an alternative. If you load Remote onto your iPod, you can control iTunes on the Mac in your…

  • Tivo tip: Shut down everything to transfer shows off a TivoHD

    For a while now, I’ve been trying in vain to move a copy of the film Notting Hill off my TivoHD and onto my iPod. It’s all legit. The TivoHD allows such a transfer using a Mac and Toast’s Tivo Transfer software. The Tivo itself is networked with one of Netgear’s Powerline HDX101 adapters, which…

  • Clean the closet – before and after

    As I mentioned yesterday, we did a huge closet cleaning project recently. Here’s the before shot (notice the pile of 10 years of junk from the likes of Linksys, Apple, Fuji, Brother, Uniden and every other brand I’ve ever blogged about): And here’s the after shot:

  • Netgear’s nearly identical powerline adapters

    After my recent whiny post about Netgear’s confusing line of networking adapters which run over your electrical wiring, a friend this week volunteered to take my medium-speed powerline adapters off my hands. So it’s on to the grown-up stuff: the supposedly 200 megabit per second bad boys. Annoyingly, the faster version has no model with…

  • Netgear’s confusing power play

    I was reading the latest issue of the excellent Mac newsletter Tidbits this morning when I came across an article comparing the performance of a wifi network to one of the new powerline networks. Ah, I thought to myself, I remember when I hoped that powerline, which runs ethernet over the electrical wiring in your…

  • Solving Tivo download issues

    I’ve tried a variety of programs to get TV shows off our Tivo and onto my iPod, mainly so the kids can watch some of their favorites while traveling. The Tivo, which sits in our bedroom far from the nearest wireless access point, was connected to the Internet and our home net via a Netgear…

  • Mine wifi eyes doth deceive me

    Hmm…just the other day, it seemed like the installation of Netgear’s 85-megabits-per-second Powerline switches had sped up my home office link to the net. It may have been an optical illusion. Just now, at least according to Speakeasy’s broadband speed test, my wifi download speed in my home office, which used to seem so weak,…

  • Electrifying speed from Netgear’s Powerline

    I moved my home office to another part of the house recently but there was was one small problem — a chimney ran behind one of the walls, greatly diminishing my wifi signal. Running ethernet cable would have solved the problem at a mighty cost so I decided to try the latest networking over power…

  • Netgear’s switching gear just works

    With most of the computers in the house able to network via ethernet at gigabit speeds, I’ve used a Linksys gigabit router to connect them. It doesn’t affect web surfing speed, which is constrained by the much slower cable modem, but it’s great for backing up files from one computer to another (someday my NAS…