Pierre’s Lab

Being a happy Vonage customer since long time, I wanted to look at several options to get a soft phone line for my computer.

Vonage offer a monthly $9.99 solution using the XT-Pro interface which is not the best one, the contact list is awful, the speed dial doesn’t work unless you use a 3 digit scheme etc…

I tried Skype IN and OUT which are not free but offer nice features that Vonage lacks. I called France - free with Vonage, Few cents a minute with Skype.

Quality wise, Skype is far behind Vonage between echo, cracking, silence and other weird noises Skype’s quality is not really land line quality. Vonage offers a quality almost as good as a land line and it’s free to almost all countries in Europe, Canada, Mexico and Puerto Rico.

Between Vonage and Skype you have to choose, quality and features. Vonage’s interface lacks features and Skype lacks quality.

In the past, I wasn’t very happy with D-Link. I had several problems with my previous wireless network. I tried Buffalo, D-Link and both were regularly failing, the worse being Buffalo. The LinkSys wireless router was the best.

After the fire, I upgraded my equipment with the latest LinkSys 54G but it didn’t work very well and it lacks 2 major features: GiGE ports and switching capabilities. So the darn box crashes each time we tried to download or print big files and I’m not talking about video streaming. I called customer service but all I heard was the computers’ fault.

I purchased the D-Link DIR-655 at BestBuy for $149. The D-Link is a full duplex GiGE and according the specification with a 10G switching capability. The web interface is also way better than the one I was used to have before and way better than the LinkSys. The only real annoying feature is that you have to reboot the box each time you make a change.

The router is installed since 2 weeks, no connection dropped even while watching video streaming, no slow connection nor wireless problems. Bottom line, for $149 you get a real piece of network supporting more than you can expect.

After testing it on my computer, I installed Windows Vista on 3 of 5 of our computers. I just love it, it seems running much faster than XP and I’m very pleased with the network capabilities. No problem with drivers, wireless mice, keyboard or other USB devices. Even the Bluetooth ones got installed and configured smoothly without any help.
I remember when I installed my first Windows XP. I had to run everywhere to find compatible drivers.

Windows Vista, so far so good!