D-Link Xtreme N DIR-685

why photo frame?

Electronic Photo Frame - something you put on display in the lounge/bedroom etc to show to yourself / friends pictures of family, friends and places

Router - something that is plugged into the ADSL filter on the BT Master socket, often under the stairs, on a sheld or otherwise hidden away from view as the layout of the house requires.

What next TV's on Fridges?

Never buy anything labelled "xtreme"

Anything so labelled is usually anything but extreme. It seems the DIR-685 "out-of-the-box" device still needs a fair amount of configuration and tech knowledge to get all the features working, too much for the average user. Maybe the Xtreme bit refers to the extreme frustration of the average user trying to get the USB ports working, or trying to get the latest firmware. D-Link used to make reallly good and simple ADSL routers, why can't they go the extra mile and make the whole thing just work out-of-the-box, it's not like other NAS devices haven't already?

I vowed never to...

...buy another D-Link product in my life after experiencing living hell dealing with their idiotic and pushy indian tech support people - they kept ringing me up about a support call I'd put in, fair enough its customer 'care' - but every time I dealt with them, there was simply no fix to my problem.

Can't remember what the issue was any more but we're talking basic functionality. Eventually I had to tell them to stop calling me, and close the call, despite it being totally unresolved. They had no way of escalating the issue to anybody higher, let alone the engineers.

And put it this way, this jack-of-all-trades but master-of-none product doesn't exactly make me want to rush down to the shops after it. Especially with its £200 price tag.

I tell you what D-Link - you double up on the screen size, make it capacitive touch screen, media streamer (yeah 'Jerome 0') and generally make it a bit more compatible and faster (making the Gigabit Ethernet a little less pointless) oh and just make it suck a little less, sell it for 200 notes or less cos as it is its sinfully overpriced, oh you'd also have to promise direct support contact with the original developers, and allocate their time solely to me, THEN I might just take a second look, no promises to buying it though!

All in all, you've got your work cut out for you D-Link!

Toasty

Where's the heat dissipator?

that's got all the makings of a red hot mofo

hotter and hotter till it unsolders all the ic's from the pcb

Have owned D-Link before, never again

Anyway, weren't Cisco trying to shut the d-link arm down or something?

re: Toasty

"Anyway, weren't Cisco trying to shut the d-link arm down or something?"

ITYM LinkSys.

Some of their products are just as bad as D-Link's, but it' still a totally different company.

Fail - 'cos that's what this device does.

Always the case

Nobody *ever* gets these devices right and I can't for the life of me understand why it has to be so damned hard.

A few years back Asus developed a promising unit, but burdened it with 100Mbit ethernet. This one can't handle more than 1 user and doesn't support Linux, even though I'm quite sure it actually has Linux under the hood (didn't bother with the entire article.

Why?

I guess we will have to wait for apple to build one only to charge us twice as much.

NAS - NOT!

It doesn't really have NAS. To call it NAS it would need to support NFS or CIFS/SMB at a minimum. Anything else (FTP/HTTP/DNLA/UPNP) is NOT NAS!