Customer reviews for the NetGear DG834G Wireless BT ADSL Modem/Router & Firewall 802.11g

fanatastic and bad

Reviewed by Anonymous Review Posted 14/12/2005

i bought two routers 17 months ago. one for my son and one for myself. once i learnt how to configure mine it has worked for the past 17 months non stop!!! always on!!! no problems whatsoever. my son's broke down after 8 months was exchanged for 20 pounds as he did not want to wait to senjd and receive an exchange. just now it broke down again completely. he has decided to buy another make. i dont know how another make will be as he has not installed it.

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Good but definately not perfect

Reviewed by Anonymous Review Posted 19/02/2004

I did read the doggy reviews about this product but still went for the gamble as it was the best product that time. Works good, and my firmware update was successfull as well. It took me sometime to get the wireless working but still wep is not working. The funny thing about wireless is that Signal strength is always full but speed is always fluctuating and sometimes is 1MB only ! You will have to reboot the router after every day or two, cuz it just gets intermittent. I just hate when the router is down and I cannot access my home PC from work. If I don't get another firmware update then I'm looking to buy another router in near future.

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Good but not perfect

Reviewed by Anonymous Review Posted 20/04/2004

Very easy to set up, auto set up is fab! I have to reboot it every day as it says it is working but isn't, so not so good, but this is easy to do. The wireless is not bad, I have it in the back bedroom and I get low signal strength in the lounge, so a bit disappointed with the range. Haven't tried to Utopian dream of sitting working in the garden yet as advertised.

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Does what it says

Reviewed by . Review Posted 14/02/2005

The best piece of equipment around at the time, I've been running this now for 6 months, initially with early firmware (V1.03.xx) it dropped the connection every week but since upgrading to V1.05.00 it works for around month before it drops the wireless connection, pull the power on the router for a second and it's back in no time. It would have got 5's except for this. I got it with the free USB wireless adapter and that made it a great deal. No network cables, no phone extensions and a firewall built in. Easy to configure the allowed wireless PC's through a web interface and you can hide your SSID so no-one can find the wireless network.

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Netgear DG834G

Reviewed by Anonymous Review Posted 21/02/2004

After a month in use, this product does a good job with very little hassle. The firmware upgrade 1.03 installed without problems. Main PC is LAN connected. Second PC and Laptop are wireless connected. Wireless performance improved greatly when the drivers for the Netgear PCI card and PC-card were upgraded to the latest version (January 2004). The drivers include improved configuation utilities. The performance also improved when ipconfig (WinXP) was used to clean up DNS cache and get rid of old data from previous set-ups.

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Have 4 all fine

Reviewed by Anonymous Review Posted 21/07/2004

Had no problems upraded the firmware every time, most problem that every one get is mainly from the adsl providers ( changing the ip address at midnight just to irretate people who don't use there pacific adsl modems

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resilient to kids

Reviewed by Anonymous Review Posted 02/10/2004

Well, this experience shows how resilient this wireless router is !!
I found one evening that my 20 month old boy had ripped the router from its cables, placed it in the bathroom sink, and turned the tap on.
It must have been running for 15 minutes before I realised !!

Dried the router out on the radiator, rebooted and reset, and it works!
Bit of a pain to set up, instructions very limited.
Make sure you set your ISP password to 7 or more digits.
And you may need to change MTU size (under WAN settings) to 1400 (from 1458) if you cannot get secure pages.

Netgear online support very helpful.

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bit sketchy but generally pleased

Reviewed by Anonymous Review Posted 16/03/2005

Very easy to use interface for administration and initial connection was easier than the Wanadoo modem we used to use. Easy to add encryption and restrictions if you need them.
The problem I had with mine was the range - most of the time it'll be excellent everywhere, sometimes it'll not transmit at all. Still trying to work out why...

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Value for money

Great until the firmware upgrade

Reviewed by Anonymous Review Posted 18/01/2004

Installed easily out of the box. Overall pretty happy with it.

I've hit 2 problems
- took quite a while to set up the (WEP) security on it - the manual isn't very clear (though it does depend on what you have at the other end). I'm still not sure how secure my setup is. It appears that this is common across most / all vendors.
- the box comes with 1.02 firmware. I upgraded to 1.03, and this screwed it up completely. I couldn't find anything on the netgear web site - luckily the broadbandreports.com forums have not only the problem description, but also the software to fix it (including the manual). So
1) don't take this upgrade now unless you need it
2) pick up the utilities now in case you ever need them in future!!!

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Surpsingly reliable

Reviewed by Anonymous Review Posted 06/05/2005

Bearing in mind others criticisms, I found this unit to be reliable. I update the firemware which helped with our low quality ADSL line and have experienced solid performance (as well as 'out of the box', so not entirely necessary to update).
Wireless performance is slower than other routers but it's never dropped out, and I've used it to transfer Gbs with no problems.

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