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This grey oblong box and be used vertically and for that purpose a stand is supplied in the box. In it's more usual horizontal mode it is 24x15x3.5cm (add another 3.5cm to the 15cm depth for the cables). It has a silver grey top and the rest of the unit is near black.

The front edge has seven LED's all clearly marked and well documented in the manual. As indeed are the connections on the rear of the unit. These are a small Reset push button (when all else fails) Internet/WAN or modem socket, the power adapter socket and finally four LAN sockets arranged in a 2x2 configuration.

The forth LAN socket is capable of being used either as a straightforward LAN port or by pressing a button beside port 4 into an uplink port. This means that you can connect another router to this unit by simply connecting a simple patch cable between the two routers and the second routers ports become additions to this router.

See also: Networks

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During my recent review of the Belkin USB 10/100 Ethernet Connector (8/7/05) this was the router that was used during most of my tests. I also used the ZyXEL modem (reviewed 30/5/05) for the connections to the outside world. 

Setup was simple just insert the CD and follow the prompts, the most taxing thing you will need to do is insert your ISP's user name and password. Being wizard driven I have no doubt an expert could do everything quicker using the modems web address and filling in everything in a browser window. However I do not think that is who this piece of kit is aimed at. After several screens and around five minutes all is done and any PC's connected to the router should now be able to connect to the Internet. This I managed with the three machines I connected without any problem. One I set to download a large file. Another was set to www.bbc.co.uk/London and viewing the Peregrine Falcons nest on a London tower block while the third did some more mundane tasks. All were quite happily running through the ZyXEL modem.

The next task was not as straightforward getting the three PC's (or rather two notebooks and one PC) to talk with each other. However as they were all running Windows XP setting up a network with limited rights was not difficult but I still wonder why this cannot be added to the router setup as another wizard. For the novice this is still a daunting task, although a lot easier under Windows XP as you configure one PC and take the floppy disc to the second and third etc and then configure these. My last notebook did not have a floppy drive and so I copied the file to a pen drive and this worked fine.

Be careful what you allow others to see, after all if creating a network for the family I am sure you do not want to let your children loose with your bank details do you!!!

Networks are the way things are going in the home, sharing things like printers make it all worthwhile and some thought about what who is allowed to see, copy or use should be your only headache. For families with their own PC's I would suggest little more than a  single folder or each PC and peripheral devices is a good place to start. The stated www.dabs.com/uk price is £37.09

http://www.dabs.com/uk/Search2/Product+Details.htm?quicklinx=2V3J