NETGEAR WPN824NA Wireless Mimo Router

Received 2 days after placing order - usual great Amazon/UPS service. Only took 20 minutes to be up and running with my desktop (running XP) and wireless router WPN824. It did get a bit dicy after that. My first attempt to access via my laptop (HP running Vista) kept saying it did not recognize the security key - tried several variations of security. In frustration, I reset to defaults and brought it up with NO security. Worked fine. I then went back and simply set for WPA2 level of security, created a new passphrase and up it came. Have no idea why it took several hours of "playing" to get to that point. I think that the lack of experience with Vista and poor Vista documentation as how to find the place to adjust my settings on the laptop's wireless adapter was more the problem, not Netgear. It now runs fine with Good reception up to 55 feet through several wall and Excellent in the same room with router or the two rooms on second floor above it. Unfortunately the router cannot be in the center of the house, but in one corner. However, I don't think I will need to buy the Netgear adapter for the laptop. For my needs, the speed is fine. At one point, a family member and I were both on at once with two laptops and no noticable problems and no dropped lines. Cannot comment on reliability as I am talking about 5 days experience with it. Based on this, I highly recommend it.******Here we are 5 years later and the router is dead. But, converting to ATT Uverse which provides its own gateway for all devices so no longer needed anyhow. Not sure how long one of these should have lasted, but my desktop is 7, laptop 5, and monitor at least 10 years old. I have recycled several computers as old as 1985 that still ran perfectly, just too obsolete to run modern software. Guess I expected more from the router. Lowered my rating to 4 stars. Ok while it lasted!

I would have given this a 5 star rating, but there is a setup problem in the software and poor tech support. The router works great, I was able to connect to the internet on all computers with a good signal anywhere in my 5000 square foot 2 story house. The instructions for setting up security and encryption are sketchy but I was able to figure it out. The problem I had is I was unable to use file and printer sharing until I spent over 8 hours troubleshooting, and this unit is installed on a brand new Dell 5100 that should have no unusual conflicts or configuration problems. Tech support was worse than useless. Nothing on the web site on troubleshooting file or printer sharing, and the phone rep (in India, it sounded like), didn't even know how Windows XP printer sharing works, and when I tried to explain what it said on his own company's web site, he hung up on me. Thank goodness for Google, as I was finally able to find (on "askmarvin") a fix. XP Home edition has "NWLink IPX/SPX/NetBIOS Compatible Transport Protocol" turned off by default, and this has to be installed under the local ethernet adapter, and Network Setup Wizard has to then be rerun on every computer. I suspect config problems are common with all wireless routers, but it seems this should not happen on a new computer, and Netgear should fix their setup software. I still recommend the unit but you may be taking a chance on file and printer sharing unless you have the patience to troubleshoot it yourself.

read review all over and thought that it was good product. I purchased and in seconds was up and running. Was so glad that the setup was a breeze. I am a person who downloads a lot of stuff and somehow felt that the download was slow. I have a 20mbps connection - I checked the speed when connected wirelessly. I was surprised it was 9 mbps. I connected with a wire - speed was 20mbps. Ok so i checked my wireless card with another wireless router works perfect. Called customer service - Very polite people on the other end. They created a case and helped out but were not able to solve it, kept blaming my wireless card. I went and got a new wireless card - netgear. Still the same issues continued. Called them up. they created another case number - made me do the same steps as was done during the first case number. ever since that I am calling every work and creating case numbers but neither the customer support knows what to do - they always end up saying a senior technician will call but dont fall for that trap - no one is going to call you.My advise stay away from this product and to be on the safe side stay away from Netgear as such - their customer service sucks but one thing good about the customer service is that they speak politely even if they dont know anything.

My Linksys WRT54G was getting a bit old and slugish, so I decided to buy a new router. I decided to go for one of the MIMO routers, to get a bit of extra range. Went for the Netgear, because of price, and previous good experience with Netgear products.The product worked pretty well out of the box, and I got it up and running pretty quickly. However, the user interface (especially when compared to what I had in the Linksys), could use some work. I could not find control over L2TP and IPSEC passthrough, which is very strange. also when configuring IP's and other things, it was quite confusing.I also did not like the fact that to manually configure the router (and get rid of the wizard), you had to work pretty hard. The documentation and help is not up to par with what I was used to in Linksys.Although the product works well, I am not sure if I would buy this product again. I would probably buy a Linksys product (had very bad experience with Belkin products so that is not really an option for me).