Netgear DS104

From time-to-time, I get overtaken by the need to buy a gadget. One such occassion caught me in PC World, where they were selling network hubs at a bargain price. I know it's hard to believe but, every now and again, PC World are actually cheaper than some mail-ordr stores. Anyway I had a developing need to link a few PCs together at home. Nothing fancy you understand, just so that my Girlfriend could share my cablemodem connection from her PC and also provide a bit of space for friends should they arrive to play a multi-player game. So my requirements were quite simple, somewhere between 4 and 10 ports would suit my needs. Ideally I wanted ...  Read the complete review

Hi all well here is another opinion of mine that i must tell you about. I recently purchased a networking kit after a lot of research i decided to go for the Netgear Network Starter Kit(model SB105) as it contained everything i needed to setup my 2 pc`s. 2 x 10/100 FA311 PCI networking cards 2 x 3 meter category 5 cable with RJ-45 Connectors. 1 x EN2005 Ethernet Hub + power supply. 1 X Driver disk. 1 x Resources cd. Good news Netgear has included pictures so you cant go wrong. It took me 2 hrs from start to finish and that included me eating my tea and popping to the shops etc. Now the really good news is that ...  Read the complete review

The DS104 is a decent hub, but ultimately you need to think about what you're using it for. My friends and I bought this hub bewteen us for our LANS, with 4 ports it accomodates us, though we also have an 8 port version (DS108). The hub does a smooth 100mbps which is good enough for any LAN party or general office use. We found it easy to set up, just take it out of the nice box, plug it into the wall, plug your comptuers in and off you go. The hub has hundreds of LED's so you can monitor it's activity and see when someone is lagging your game of Quake2, stealing all your mp3s :) The hub is high quality and does exactly ...  Read the complete review

I wanted to network a couple of PC's so I did some research and decided to buy Netgear's SB105 starter kit. Reasons, It was cheap, the NICs (Network Interface Card, which fits in the PC) are 10/100 so when time to upgrade, only the hub needs upgrading. Unlike Alanelf however I have had problems. I own a Gateway Athlon Desktop PC into which I installed the first card and tried booting the pc. Nothing, I changed NICs, I moved the sound and modem cards around, i took them out, still nothing. I called Netgear's free helpline, they told me it was a hardware conflict and I should contact Gateway, this annoyed me because i have been here before ...  Read the complete review

This hub is a nice little piece of kit; it comes with all the usual. The package I got came with 2 CAT 5 cables and the hub and its power supply unit. Its very easy to set up, plug one end of a RJ45 cable into you’re card and then the other end into one of the ports on the hub and do the same with another computer, set up the network settings and plug the thing in and away you go, It automatically senses if the network cards are T base 10 or 100 and then runs it accordingly. I’ve not had any problems with the hub at all and it has been used a lot as far as hubs go. There’s not much else I can say about it. ...  Read the complete review