This is on sale for seventy dollars minus thirty dollar rebate, so forty dollars at Frys.

Note! There are two MR814's. The "old" one: big box, loud, uses old Intersil chip, not as good reception. The "new" one is marked as MR814v2 for "version 2." This one is about half the size of the old, quiet, and uses a much more powerful chip from a new supplier, Marvell. All for the same price. You just have to check each box at the store until you find a MR814v2. I'd say at the Frys in Palo Alto, CA, that there were about 50% old ones and 50% new ones. If you can get a new one, by all means do this. You'll have a much better product for the same amount of money.

Also bought the MA401, Netgear's wireless card, and it worked like a charm in the first 5 minutes. Also for forty dollars.

Eighty dollars to get a complete Wi-Fi network for your home or apartment. Can't go wrong here.

I had quite a bit more trouble getting WEP working to my home desktop. That required another > 1 hour call to tech support.

This is my first experience with 802.11b, but I have to say I was not satisfied with Netgear. I would try another brand if I were buying another LAN.

As many reviews indicated, you really want to change lots of default settings to setup a secure network. Under the Wireless settings, change SSID, set up the Wireless card Access List, Enable WEP security encryption (and rotate the passphrases). Change the default password (and keep changing it once in a while). Under LANIPSetup, assign static IP addresses to all the PCs and laptops.

The only problem I faced with this router is I can't connect to the laptop directly from desktop (and viceversa) unless I disable the software firewall on both the machines. Called Netgear Tech support and they told me to disable the software firewall (I have Zone Alarm installed on once and Black Ice on the other) to connect from one machine is another machine. It is a pain. Once I disabled the firewall, I can share files and printer without any problem.

The wireless connection through the PCMCIA card is very good. I get very good (above 90% signal strength) signal all around my home including patio.

If your primary objective is to share the internet connection among multiple computers, MR814 is a very good router and you don't have a pay a lot too.

I just plugged it in and then all 6 of our computers were connected to the internet (4 wired, 2 wireless). And two of the computers are Apple iBooks running AirPort.

Appearance-wise the router is attractive, comes with its own stand (will keep it cooler than when touching the floor) and just flat out works. The best 802.11b router you'll find at the price.

Netgear and Linksys are really good, but I've had so many problems with D-Link. If you need a wireless router for around fifty dollars, this is the way to go.

Pros:
Netgear did an awesome job by making this 'slick' looking router with nice lights. There's even a sticker which explains what each lights are for. Setup is straight forward. For most people, they will only need to stick with first 2 pages (and sub-pages of those) to get everything done.

The ugly:
First-You'll start to get into some hairy stuff with the wifi page. When you set the 'country' and 'channel', you will notice that after refresh it disappears. Sometimes it sticks, but most of the time, you have to do this several times. Not only that, the help tab does not show up until you've made a change. Obviously a bug.
Second-The port forwarding on the older firmware is flaky. You will need to upgrade your firmware to the latest released, which was in May.

The really UGLY stuff.
My SMC router was working fine in an urban environment. If I sniff the air, I see 5 other routers. So, I plug this thing in, put it on the same channel as SMC and it just flaked out. This router can not be trusted to be up 24x7 yet. Occasionally it will just die, and require a hard boot. After the firmware upgrade, router seems to have stabilized, but prior to this, it would die every other day from who-knows-what.

In short, this router is pretty nice looking, and seems to have stabilized with '4.11' firmware revision. The new firmware has only been out for couple of weeks, and I've only had to reboot once. After you upgrade the firmware, I recommend that you hard reset it via the button on the unit.

For now, I can not recommend this product.

I've tested it with ISO downloads with the new firmware (Redhat 9, 3 iso's each with ~700megs) and the thing stayed up. Prior to that, this thing would hang. If you are going to power this thing on and off every day, then it's a good deal But if you want something you want to configure once, and deal with it maybe 4x a year, this unit has not proven itself to me. The new firmware seems to be great, but it's only been 2 weeks since it's release (installed the day after it was released), and it took them 3 months to release it. Then again, I can not recommend SMC either. If you have the money, and are willing to pay for stability, Linksys seems to be the choice.

BTW: There's a 2nd version of this router, and it's supposidly smaller, and no longer has the 'detachable' antenna.

I set it up and in 15 minutes was cruising the internet. At first I couldn't get on the internet. So I checked the settings and realized I haven't added to the list of wireless nodes that is accessing the router. After that no problemo.

Just be sure to read some of the tips provided by the readers below and above as I learned a few things I wouldn't have by looking at the instruction manual. The biggest tip I learned was the idle time disconnection parameter. Someone posted recommending you put in 0 and that is a big tip to keep in mind. There are a few others so it's worthwhile to browse for these.

Also I had no problems with SSH despite what one of the readers said below. I use SSH as a major component of my work and no problems here.

Overall I highly recommend this one.

The signal strength had me worried at first, then I read a review that suggested trying different channels. Guess what??
The default channel is 11, I then tried channel 1, and the signal strength is really strong.

Very good product.

Now it is here and after a 10 minute installation, it is up and ready. My only problem is that the signal strength is not very good. It works fine when my laptop is 2 feet away, but when
I put my laptop in another room (about 60 feet away), the signal strength fell to 50%. After moving it around through a few locations, I finally found a spot where the strength is about 90%.

In essence, nothing great, but good value for the money.
Now I hope my mail-in rebate comes in a couple of months.

Other than the above mentioned bug, the router works great. Easy to setup, works with PPoE in Europe, etc. For people that complain about the signal and/or range, try changing the channel. The default for France is channel 11 and I got poor signals. I set the region to Europe and channel 1 and my signal is excellent in another room through two solid concrete walls.