My first home router; worked like a champ for approximately seven years. Had only 801.11B coverage, but made it through the house fine. Little bulky compared to today’s models, but cooler running. Allowed unlimited time for clients via DHCP, so was effectively a DNS server (until a box or router was turned off for whatever reason).

Again, a trooper. (Note the dust – actual unit!)

Same footprint as the B router; this G router (which I bought on sale to keep as a backup) is about one-half to two-thirds the height of the old router.

Runs much hotter, and drops so much that I just bailed on it in less than a month. Piece of crap (but faster, when it runs…credit where credit is due).

Also, the old router had six ports: Internet in; four switch ports; one uplink.

This one (and subsequent models) get rid of the uplink port – any one can uplink (good), but steals a port (bad). Fortunately, I have space on my supplemental switch so this is not an issue (yet….).

OK, this is a nice looking unit (hey, no external antennas!), and so far has been working well, but I’m kinda soured on Cisco right now. No front lights, so I have to look in the back to see what’s going on (I’m sure that’s to save $$ somewhere, but idiotic for home use), and it seems to run hot, so I have configured with some breathing room. (Awkward!)

This will run 801.11N; I only have G running now, and it’s fast. Hasn’t dropped since I put it in a couple of days ago, so we’ll see how that goes.

I bought this unit because I can assign MAC to certain IPs, so I might lose a terminal window, but when an IP is refreshed on said computers, the IP stays. Again, too early to tell how that is going (I have the max lease time going – about six days – so I should start to see stuff after ~ three days).

Fingers crossed – which is always a (not) good way to run a network!