Logitech diNovo Media Desktop Wireless Multimedia Control Panel, Keyboard and Mouse (967562-0102)

LAST update: (Apr 16, 2006) I can't believe it's been more than 2 years since I wrote this review. Over these 2 years, I haven't really bothered with my D-Link setup. It just works without any problems. I'm very happy with it. I probably upgraded the firm-ware once or twice. I remember with the last upgrade, it became a bit faster as I could play all the music videos over the wireless network. I'm still not using Super-G mode as one of my laptops has a built-in non D-Link card which doesn't work with Super-G.

Summary: (Apr 6, 2004) After a few months, I have learned to get around the problems I described here. Even though I'm still disappointed at them, I would probably buy another D-Link. I had a chance to try a Netgear G router and found that D-Link's range is much better. With D-Link, my basement PC's network speed is as fast as the one next to the router. With Netgear, the speed is often slower than a dial-up. Besides, D-Link has been very stable. Another plus is that D-Link offers more user configuration options, especially for performance. Finally, D-Link's G router is upgradable to 108 Mbps through firmware while Netgear sells 2 different versions. Because of all the above, I changed my rating from * to ****. Anyway, the following is the review I started a few months ago.


I have used DI-614+, D-Link's wireless-B router, with both their PC cards and PCI cards. The experience at the beginning was bad due to bugs. However, after a couple of firmware upgrades, it has been extremely stable and trouble-free. Then a couple of months ago, I decided to upgrade my whole setup to wireless-G, thinking after almost a year, D-Link should've worked out all the bugs.

Turned out I'm totally wrong. The router keeps disconnecting the cards, or the cards keep disconnecting from the router. What's worse, the cards often don't try to reconnect. It's a hassle having to manually reconnect every half an hour; it's a problem when a card disconnects during a long file transfer. My biggest headache, though, is with my web-server which is on a wireless connection. Everyday when I get home, the card is disconnected. This makes the web-server simply unusable.

Another problem is with the feature that D-Link calls "virtual server". A "virtual server" runs on any machine in your private network on any port (private port) and is mapped to a port of your choice (public port) by D-Link. With DI-624, it appears that only D-Link's pre-defined ports work and the public port has to be the same as the private port. As a result, even their remote management feature, which relies on forwarding public port 8080 to router's private port 80, doesn't work. I figured it out after wasting hours. In the end, I have to set my server's port to one of D-Link's pre-defined ports I'm not using. Good thing this is the only server I absolutely need.

When I got the router, D-Link has just rolled out their 108 Mbps upgrade. I was very excited. However it turned out to be a big disappointment. The max speed I can get from wired to wireless is just over 1M byte per second, which is just a tiny bit better than my old B router. I initially blamed this on my wired network card. But I was even more disappointed after I tried wireless to wireless file transfer: I couldn't even get half a MB a second. I tried changing the configurations in many ways, nothing helped.

I'm disappointed that D-Link released a product with such serious bugs. I'm even more disappointed that they don't seem to care. The firmware on their website is dated Oct 9. It's been 2 months now. Many people complained about the same problem on the web. Many of them say they complained to D-Link. I emailed their support, too, but got this reply : "due to complex nature of your enquiry, please call our tech support". I've tried their phone support before and wouldn't want to go through it again.


UPDATE: it appears that connection drops when there's a time-out, either due to a slow website or internet traffic. Right now, my connection drops every few minutes. It had been tolerable earlier today. It also seems to happen easily when I access several web pages at the same time in different windows.


UPDATE: the D-Link PCI card crashes my Win2K machine almost daily with the new driver I just installed. The previous driver crashed less frequently, but the one before it was just as bad as the new one.


UPDATE: It seems that I have fixed the connection problem by not using their super-G feature. This feature supposedly gives you 108 MB performance.


UPDATE (Mar 5, 2004): After many months, they finally put up a new version of firmware. I tried it. The problems are still there. I wasted more than an hour. Upgrading D-Link's firmware has alway been a hassle. Their new version of firmware can't read config file created by the older version so I have to manually enter all the settings myself. I pointed this out to them long time ago but nothing changed.

UPDATE (Mar 7, 2004): Tried again their Super-G mode with the new version. It does appear to have more stable connections and much faster with Win2K machines. However, the mode crashed my Win2K and WinXP machines a couple of times a day. Besides, my WinXP machines (a desktop and a laptop) are a lot slower in the new mode. Tried to upgrade drivers on my WinXP notebook. The speed with their latest driver is so slow that it's just not usable. After wasting almost the whole weekend, I decided to go back to normal G mode. The speed in this mode is not even good enough to play a music video across 2 wireless machines.

UPDATE (Mar 14, 2004): Figured out what's causing problem for their "Virtual Server" feature, with help from D-Link support. Turned out that if "Netmeeting" virtual server is enabled, other virtual servers won't work. Still a bug on their part. It's easy to get a live person from D-Link support. However, their first line people are often clueless. Their senior support people are usually very good but harder to reach.

UPDATE(Mar 31, 2004): The router went dead after I set "Fragmentation" to low end of its legal range. I can't believe it. Wasted me a lot of time and effort to get it replaced.