Metropol

I've always preferred firewire to USB, probably because my usb ports are so flakey but my firewire is sticking about Didn't apple drop firewire recently?

Only on the newer iPods. They've decided that they want them to use USB 2 instead for reasons that are anybody's guess.

99% of my netowrk gear is belkin - no issues at all and the souter is very full)
I also have a sitecom print server- (needs resetting every now and again.)

never had a bad experience with belkin either.

in fact, by far and a way the worse networking hardware i've had to deal with in stability terms (and this is more the enterprise kit, than home stuff) is hp.

their access points are pretty flaky - we had 25 of them, ALL faulty. basically they had a firmware issue where the wireless signal kept getting turned off for no reason after a random amount of time with encryption turned on.

also, their switches have a couple of issues where under certain circumstances they can fall over, where our prevous cisco kit didn't.

in terms of reliabilty in an environment where there is heavy use and they have to be fairly durable, i can't fault dlink, linksys or belkin or consumer/mid-range stuff.

I would say we have a pretty heavy home system. 3 wireless Laptops (2 for work) 2 network printers and 2 wired PCs (one on 24/7 to record video from a security camera) and a network Hard disk for backup.
(We have a home office).

Point is the belkin router works flawlessly

And 2 Nintendo DS's when needed

Neil Jones wrote:Only on the newer iPods. They've decided that they want them to use USB 2 instead for reasons that are anybody's guess.

I read somewhere that when they made them thinner and put the bigger screen on there was less room inside so they went for USB as there are more USB ports on PCs than firewire.

It's a shame though as I much prefer firewire and would be tempted to get a 4th gen colour off ebay purely for that reason if I ever upgrade mine.

The Belkin USB hub I bought was exceptionally shit.

I use 3Com. Been really pleased with it. The current standard 8011.g is 54mbits/s and you may get a turbo mode option to run at 108mbits/s but is tricky to get working and keep it stable. USB2 is 400mbits sec and USB1 10mbits/s. At the end of the day it comes down to the spead of your broadband connect for speed of downloads. 1mb broadband should give c. 112kbits per second......so the moral is, wireless wont be the bottleneck in terms of downloads from the net. However, if you are transfering files between PC, using wireless, then it makes a massive difference. For that you cant beat ethernet at 100mbits/s