Belkin N+ Wireless Router

The ASUS Netbook that I mentioned in this post arrived yesterday and I've started playing with it. So far it's good and a bit faster than I was expecting. The only two changes that I was going to make to it before buying it were to replace the 250GB drive with a 128GB SSD (Solid State Drive) and upgrade the RAM from 1GB to 2GB. However, it's a lot nippier than expected so will not worry about that yet. It arrived with Windows 7 Starter. I stuck in a thumb drive and immediately installed Windows 7 Ultimate. It was really tricky getting it to boot from the thumb drive because the hot key that you had to hit to get to the BIOS and then to pick the "boot from USB option" was difficult to time. You basically had to hit the escape key twice immediately after it was powered on.

It supports the new (yet to be finished) higher speed network standard of 802.11 N. My current wireless access point goes up to G and is flaky (update on why it might be flaky) often knocking the modem offline if a wireless device is connected to it. As such I've just been doing a whole ton of research to see what I can add to my network that will give me that best quality wireless and hopefully last several years. I hate shopping for stuff like this that I'm not expert in as I never know if I'm going to get a good deal or not. I'm also suspicious of the specs published by many of the comparison sites and even the manufacturer as they are sometimes inaccurate and I never know if the customer reviews are written by the company trying to boost their product or by a competitor trying to discredit their product.

Anyway I had to make a decision and finally went with the BELKIN N+ Wireless Router. I was comparing this to the BELKIN N Wireless Router and the only difference that I could find was that the N+ has gigabit ports while the N has 10/100MBS ports. Considering that I'm all about speed and constantly wanting to saturate my network I selected the former. I'll report back when it's installed.