Customer Reviews

D-Link DI-604 Cable/DSL Router, 4-Port Switch

5 star:		(126)
4 star:		(37)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(30)

 

 

The DI-604 is a great little router. Though I would never recommend that someone who knows nothing about configuring a router to try it on their own, this may be an exception. It has effective wizards and a remarkably user friendly interface that is accessed through your favorite web browser. The firewall seems to be effective, though my single complaint does come from that part of the device. I am yet to figure out how to shut it off when I would need to. . . But, it can be done.

I share a DSL connection over this router. I also file share and print share through the device. It has done a great job at all of the above. I have recommended this product to countless people since I purchased it in September.

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I bought the di604 because I wanted to be able to share broadband (cable modem) access with more than one computer. After having first bought an ethernet hub, thinking that was what I wanted, then returning it when I discovered that I needed a router, I picked the di604 based mostly on price and the customer reviews here.

Set-up took just a minute, plug in the cords and you're done. The software is easy too, a web-based interface that the paper manual walks you through. It sounds like other customers had no problem at all with the software setup; for me, however, it didn't work at all. As soon as I finished the setup steps, I found I had gone from broadband on one machine to no internet at all on any machines.

Needless to say, I called tech support. Needless to say, I waited on queue for a long time. But what makes me give this product five stars, after using it for less than a day, is the outstanding job that d-link tech support did. My problem turned out to be very odd and very difficult, and this guy patiently, politely and doggedly kept walking me through solutions until one worked perfectly. That alone sets the company apart in my opinion. Add the fact that the router works as advertised, and this was certainly a five-star shopping trip.

The only caveat I would include is that I haven't yet figured out how to share files between my two computers. Clearly that's one of the router's intended functions, and other customers have said in their reviews that it works. I don't doubt that it's there and I'll figure it out sooner or later, but there are no specific instructions in the documentation for this functionality. Not enough to subtract a star from my rating, but if I find I just CAN'T figure it out, you can bet I'll be back here, writing another review with a couple fewer stars.

All in all, I would heartily encourage anyone who wants to set up a home network or use their cable/dsl on more than one computer to choose this router. And it's cheap!

I did a lot of surfing of reviews here on Amazon to decide whether or not to get this Di-604. I decided... what the heck, some reviews are good and it's kinda cheap. I'll take a risk. Here's what I have to say about it:

This router is unbelievably inexpensive and feature packed. It came nicely packaged with a STATIC BAG over the router, not some cheap plastic wrap. Every page of the manual is in NICE PRINTED COLOUR. I can't believe it. For a router this cheap you would expect they'd print their manual on toilet paper like other products I've bought. I think D-Link really set a goal for making the BEST 4-pt home router for the BEST price.

I'm very picky about things, and before I bought this, I was fantasizing that maybe the router firmware programmers would add the option to select the WAN speed (10 or 100mbit), which I thought was just simply asking too much cause it's such a small detail many wouldn't care about. It turns out in one of the firmware updates that they decided to INCLUDE this. After learning this, I know this was the router for me.

Here's what happened when I brought it home: I was super worried that it wouldn't work at my house with 2 mac users and 2 PC users cause of the bad reviews. Right out of the box with old firmware (3.30) it worked FLAWLESSLY, no hassle, just simply plugging all the cables in. I couldn't believe it. I was very happy. I installed the new firmware and it's just simply working beautifully with no hangups so far. So, take my review into consideration THIS WILL WORK ON MACS (they are newer iMacs).

Also, I have REVISION E, the newest model of this baby. I honestly believe that the majority of the complaints here on Amazon are from people who bought it earlier and have the earlier revisions. Before you hand the money to the cashier (if you choose not to buy here), make sure you look at the back of the box, there is a sticker that says that revision it is (look for the letter). Don't get anything before the "E".

PS: It doesn't say on the box that it's 10/100mbit for LAN purposes, so I was a bit worried that it might not even go at 100mbit. Of course this is silly in this day of technlollogy. I ran the "iperf" network tester between two computers and the results were just as I hoped they'd be.

Excellent value and I'm very happy with this router. I used to run OpenBSD to do the job before the computer exploded during a vacation when I wasn't home to fix it for my roommates, and now I am using this puppy. Also, it's much easier to set up TCP/UDP port forwarding using its HTTP inferface. It even allows port forwarding ranges to make BitTorrenting setup easy. Google for the BitTorrenting FAQs on Dlink's site and they have a few interesting ways of setting it up.

Thanks for reading.

Within the 3 months I've had this thing up and running, I have had only a few snags in operation. Two of them were when our ISP went out for a couple hours or so, and the other was when I was figuring out how to allow certain ports to be passed through to a certain IP address. It didn't take long to figure it out, but I did have to get out the manual.

Other than those issues its been working perfect since day one. I have upgraded with all the firmwares that were released since I bought it and although I didn't know I needed it UPnP came in quite handy when I got XBOX Live for my birthday. All I had to do was plug in my XBOX into an available port on the DI-604. Next thing I know I can play games online.

I haven't had to call tech support since this is so easy and everything I've needed has been in the manual. I highly recommend this Cable/DSL Router. It has worked for me and all my games, PC or XBOX.

I purchased the DI-604 to share my Road Runner internet access with both my HP N5495 laptop and a Emachines T1220 system I purchased for my children. I removed the "Residential Gateway" (as D-link refers to the router) from the box. Plugged it in connected the cables and went through the setup without changing any suggested settings. Whole thing was operational in around 10 minutes and both systems are able to access the internet through the Toshiba PCX2200 cable modem. Been up and running for a week without any problems. Both systems running Win XP. HP Laptop is PIII 1.06 Ghz with 512 meg and the Emachines is a Celeron 1.2 Ghz with 256 meg. I am sharing a Canon S600 printer off the laptop using a Parellel cable and sharing a Canon S300 via USB from the desktop. Moving files between systems is effortless and fast. Have even played Motocross Madness 2 and Midtown Madness 2 between the systems via the network and it works great. I have Zone Alarm Pro on both systems and that works the same as it did before the router was installed. Overall my experience with this item has been fantastic.

I have a ton of D-Link products: a router, two wireless devices, four NIC's, a switch, etc, in various network settings. I really trust this company's networking products. I bought this router to share a DSL connection, and so far, it works fine. This is really a breakthrough router in terms of the price and the performance and features one gets. By default, the router acts as a DHCP server on the local LAN, and you set the router to obtain an IP address on the WAN side (DHCP, static, PPPOE, etc). One thing that confused me was that Earthlink (via Covad) used PPPOE, but the Broadmax modem they gave us took care of all that. The modem was actually a DHCP server assigning private addresses on the 172.16.0.0/16 subnet. In other words, my DSL is being NAT'ted twice--an unnecessary inefficiency. Thus, remote administration of the router doesn't work because of the DSL modem's own NAT firewall. But this isn't the router's fault at all.

Now to the caveat. The router is configured totally via a web interface. This is very good since all modern operating systems can configure the browser--no special software is required. Thus a pure Unix or Linux network can use this router. But there is a major flaw in the web-based interface. I am blind. I use a special program, called a screen reader, that interfaces with Windows and Internet Explorer 6 to verbalize the screen. The program cannot interpret graphics on the Web. It relies on the W3C standard of labeling images with alternative text, which the screen program verbalizes in place of the graphic. This is particularly important for graphics which are hyperlinks, as one can imagine. The problem is, all the hyperlinks in the administration interface of this router are images, and these images are not labeled properly with any alt= attribute. This is so easy and requires adding a short bit of code to the HTML, yet D-Link overlooked this now widespread, famous, and basic accessibility rule. I have wrote to D-Link about this, and they can correct this in a firmware upgrade, but they have not responded to this at all. The initial oversight knocks my rating down a star, and D-Link's lack of a response (after a week) knocks my rating down another star, so my rating is subject to change.

I expect to get a DSL/Cable with 4-port switch with built in firewall when I pay for a product that claims to be that. Well I got what I expected plus more. Not only am I able to assign my own firewall rules and parental controls but I am able to schedule those by day and time. As an example I could setup the firewall to allow any program that requires certain ports to be open to use (i.e. WinMX, Online Games, etc.) to work on a specific IP address but only until 10pm so my kids aren't up all night playing games, and sharing files. You can also set a schedule for the parental controls so that certain URLs or URLs with keywords you designate can't be accessed until after 11pm/when the kids are asleep. This is a very nice feature that I didn't know I was going to be able to use. There are a ton of features here that you wouldn't expect to get for a router that is priced this low. I am very surprised and pleased with this router.

I was a bit nervous about setting up my home network even though I work in the Information Technology field. The main reason was that every inexpensive 4 port broadband router (D-Link, Linksys, Netgear, etc.) had about 20% of their reviews being just terrible. You would think by reading them that buying that product was the worst thing to ever happen to the reviewer.

The D-Link 604 quick setup guide explained everything exactly as needed for a quick and painless setup process. Both my windows 98 machine and Win XP machines connected after just a few short steps, all discussed in the setup guide. The connections have never gone down, and the D-Link surprised me by remembering the config settings after I accidently unplugged it.

So far the internet gaming connections have worked without a hitch (no special port settings were needed, although D-Link supports opening up specific network ports) and a port scanner I used showed all ports to be in stealth mode as I expected. I haven't used the DMZ feature yet so I can't speak to how it performs (or doesn't).

One note: The D-Link I got has some advanced "firewall" features that the earlier 604 box covers I saw in retail stores don't mention. I imagine it includes the firmware update that everyone recommends.

Since all of the cheap routers have their share of terrible reviews, why not get the least expensive one? [Price]can't be beat...

*** UPDATE 12-6-2005 ***

I was bored and just browsing my old reviews and thought I'd add to this one. 2 years later and the DI-604 router is still chugging away! I've added another computer as well as occasionally plugging in my wife's laptop for quick file transfers.

The ONLY problems I've had with this unit were:

1. Needed a couple of firmware updates along the way to fix some minor issues with either Windows patches or new games. But farely easy to find on D-Link's website.
2. Every few months or so it will suddenly drop my PPoE connection to the Internet (DSL). The ol' unplog, count to 5, and replug fixes the problem. However, this type of thing seems to happen every so often with all DSL routers from what I hear.

All and all I'm still VERY satisfied with this little router.

In order to share my high speed connection I needed to upgrade my router since I had an older hub that did not support PPPoE. I shopped around for the least expensive, minimal bells/whistles router to share my DSL connection between my home pc and my laptop for work which uses a VPN. I had read a few reviews on various products about configuration with PPPoE connections and that they were sometimes problematic. I was prepared for the worst when I opened the box and within 10 minutes everything was connected and working without a problem. The instructions could not have been easier to follow and with the built-in connection wizard it is virtually idiot proof. All I needed to know was my ISP user id and password and the D-Link software took care of the rest. I was immediately able to connect my laptop, share the high speed connection, tunnel through the VPN for work and continue surfing happily along the web. Although I have not been using it extensively yet this product has exceeded my expectations. I would highly recommend this product, and for less then $30 (with the $10 rebate) you can't go wrong!

The DI-604 is an excellent value. It's flexible, it has a firewall, and D-Link tech support is impressive. The router was very easy to install in the sort of configuration most people will want for a home or small office. Just use the "quick install" card that comes with it. (But you do have to turn your cable modem off and then back on after it's installed, a detail not noted on the card). There's no printed manual, but there's a pretty good manual on a CD that comes with the router.

In my case I wanted to get remote access to my office through a virtual private network, which is a tweak most people won't have to think about. The manual didn't cover that, so I sent an e-mail to D-Link tech support on a Saturday afternoon and had a comprehensive answer back Saturday night.

This is the second time I've installed a router for a home broadband connection. The first time, the router cost $200 (about 18 months ago). We're all used to seeing shrinking prices for electronic equipment, but this is really a breakthrough price for a very good product.