Buying Advice

Have just found this:

http://www.practicallynetworked.com/howto/choose_a_w...

- a site which seems to offer good, clear guidance to non-experts like me.

It seems particularly good at explaining which features and which aspects of performance are not important to users with simple and modest requirements. This is something which experts often overlook, and who unfortunately (but perhaps naturally) tend to get all excited about high performance and speeds, and exotic features which simple users probably don't need and certainly don't understand.

I would be interested to hear the views of people who are more knowlegeable than me.

And I would contrast it with the near-useless (as is often the case) info on the Consumers' Association "Which?" site. Here, they fail to make any distinction between "ease of use" and "ease of setup"; they make no mention of frequency of disconnections; and their "Best Buy" list is almost entirely full of Linksys routers which some users report terrible problems with ...

Router choice is a mine field, I agree!

For me, I don't care how geeky the user interface is - all I care about is how it's ADSL performance is and how it copes with long, noisy lines!

Everything else can be 'sorted out'.

If you are close to your exchange you can nearly get away with a length of wet string and still get connected! But if your line isn't 100% then many other factors come in to play.

I've experimented with many routers - finding that different chipsets can have a missive effect on how my connection performs. If the graphical interface is bad then I'm willing to get around this by using telnet and the command line interface.
If the wireless is poor then I'm happy to plug in an additional Wireless Application Gateway.

You can have the nicest looking GUI, but if it keeps losing sync then to me it's no good.