Belkin F5D7633-4UK Review

Overall Rating

Known manufacturer. Good Signal. Relatively easy to set up and reliable once working correctly. It is working with an Acer laptop with XP Home, and an old PC with Win98SE, and they network through it quite happily.

I cannot persuade it to accept a new network name rather than the default Belkin name, but that is probably just me! The Win98SE was more difficult to connect than the XP Home, but it just needed a bit of thought.

I chose Belkin because I have some of their other products. They also use the same wireless system manufacturer as my new laptop wireless, so should be better for compatibility. The supplier also included a free (usually £25) Belkin PC wireless board as part of the deal, which I would have had to buy anyway.
The Belkin F5D7633-4UK router has four ethernet ports, which I don't really need, apart from the initial setup, which is best done via an ethernet cable connection. There may be other models available with different ports.

Members' Comments onZeb4's Review

• ppham93 on 22nd Jan 2006

  Listen, I am a full time IT engineer and work a lot with wireless things. This one is the worst I have ever dealt with. Literally spent nights just getting things in range in the client's office, btw client NIC's were Belkin, so no manufacturer incompabilities. Even with desktop antennas, the range and signal were poor. I never managed to get more than 3 bars with speed constantly changing between 1mbps and 36 mbps, after I changed to Frame Burst mode. Finally I ended up replacing it with a Cisco Aironet 1231 and all problems were gone. 125 mbps speed? That's a lie. I only got that speed at point blank. Then I took it back home and tried replacing my old D-Link DWL-900AP+ (802.11b). Bad choice... I just can't get it working at 125 mbps. Don't buy it, unless you are a masochist or have too much money to launder. PS: you know what, when using it as a pure access point, you can't set the IP default gateway, no joke.