| NETGEAR WGPS606 54 Mbps Wireless Print Server with 4-port Switch |
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Model: WGPS606
Brand: Netgear
Manufacturer: Netgear
Average Rating: 
(submit your review here)
Total Reviews: 78
Form factor: External
Hardware platform: PC
Data link protocol: Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, IEEE 802.11b, IEEE 802.11g
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| Features: |
Print wirelessly and connect to more than one printer
No need to add print servers, wireless adapters, or unsightly Ethernet cables
Two USB ports and a 4-port 10/100 Ethernet Switch
Easy setup via Smart Wizard configuration assistant
Works with all standard 802.11g and 802.1b wireless routers and access points |
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| Description: |
| Would you and the other users in your network like the freedom to print wirelessly? And, to connect to more than one printer, without having to add print servers, wireless adapters, or unsightly Ethernet cables? With NETGEAR's 54 Mbps Wireless Print Server with 4-Port Switch, now you can! In seconds, you can connect two printers and four PCs to your wireless network - all with one simple device. NETGEAR's 54 Mbps Wireless Print Server has two USB ports, as well as a wireless Ethernet bridge mode with a 4-port switch. That means you can connect your computer to your high-end color printer for your business use, and send the kids' documents to your older Inkjet printer - all without wires! Best of all, more than four users can use the printer, without adding any additional wireless adapters. |
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| User Reviews (78 total): |
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Piece of cake, April 4, 2006
By Happily Married with Children (Houston, TX USA)
I read scary reviews about print servers and was very reluctant to buy one, however, I eventually broke down and bought the Netgear WGPS606, 54Mbps. I was shocked that it was a piece of cake to install. The wizard spoon feeds you the installation steps. 1) You make sure that the printer you want to share has a driver installed on the computer (any computer can be used to configure your computer). 2) You disconnect your computer from your router (if applicable) and connect the print server via network cable provided 3) the wizard configures the printer to the Print server. I ran into problems at this stage, however, the wizard offered three possible troubleshooting scenarios - one was related to the firewall. Surely enough, once I disabled my firewall, the wizard was able to continue with configuring the print server 4) the wizard then automatically assigned an IP and tested a print page. It worked great! Then I moved the print server to a corner in our living room (stand alone- connected to the printer only). Next I ran the wizard on each laptop to configure the connection to the print server ... it took less than 5 minutes per machine before it started printing. Again, the only problem was related to my software firewalls (Zonealarm and Norton) - Once I disable both and everything worked. Once done, I re-enabled my firewalls and everything still worked. Great product. All in all, it took less than an hour. I should have done it sooner.
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Simple to set up; works great, March 18, 2006
By PhB (Boulder, CO USA)
This product is very easy to set up and use. I bought it to integrate into an existing wireless network as a print server and access point. I am an experienced computer user, but this was so simple to set up that I would recommend it to almost anyone who needs these features. I had no trouble installing my HP and Brother printers with it.
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Good Bang for the Buck., February 27, 2006
By S.M. (ASHEVILLE, NC United States)
Excellent design and featureset with 2 printer ports. It helps to have some previous experience regarding the pitfalls of printserver setup, but considering the competition (or lack of), this is a very versatile product. When ones' usb printer dies, it can be replaced with one of the many excellent, inexpensive, networkable printers, and still have the bridge capability available. I'm still impressed.
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Works great as a Wireless Bridge, February 22, 2006
By D. Whiting (Carlsbad, CA USA)
I'm not reviewing this on the Print Server functionality, since I don't actually use it for that. As another reviewer stated in his review, this is the only reasonably priced, widely available wireless bridge I could find. I have a lot of wired network devices in one room upstairs with the router and modem in my landlord's office downstairs. Rather than buy wireless cards for all those devices or run a wire downstairs, this did the trick. I plug everything (including another switch) into this switch and I'm connected to the router downstairs.
It took some tweaking to get it working correctly. At first, it would drop connection for seemingly no reason and not pick it up again. Somehow that went away, enough resetting and tweaking and it's worked great for the last 5 months or so.
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Great As Long As You Don't Use Their Wizard And Get Instructions From Website, January 23, 2006
By Tecky (Fargo ND)
This router is great... it's the only affordable wireless 802.11G printserver that I could find that supports WPA-PSK secruity!!! BUT if you are not someone that know's what security is or how to set up the wireless access point without the wizard you don't want this. After I went and got the manual from the netgears web site, and found out default ip is 192.168.0.102 ( if I remeber correctly) to set up the secruity and SSID to match my D-Link ExtremeG router it worked great... after that point the wizard worked fine to set up the printer... Also the 4 port switch is going to come in very handy until I decide to get ride of my old computer and put it's wireless PCI card into the new computer I built...
It's kind of funny how everyone makes their routers with WPA-PSK security but the only advertising that their printservers support it is netgear...
By the way my HP Deskjet printer is not on the compatiblity list and it works... The key here is to have the print driver installed on your computer. Once the info leaves your computer it's formated all the print server does is forward it to the printer it doesn't need to know anything about what kind of printer you have!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Minimum but adequate, December 10, 2005
By leapyeardad (Nashua, NH United States)
We use it for a wired switch and as a USB print server. It works fine provided you don't touch anything after. Ever. It is not plug-and-play with the USB ports and won't wake up a printer to print, if powered off, unlike a direct USB connect. I was unable to configure the device at one point because I swapped USB ports. The unit had to have a hard reset (remove power) in order to be reconfigured. Same when I powered down the printer and turned printer back on again. It could not recognize it had a printer anymore. We have three users at home, so this is pretty harmless, but it isn't the plug and play you would expect for USB or network configuration. And from the reviews of the SC101 drive, it appears to be a constant theme for netgear to go proprietary on its interfaces to what you would think would be "generic" network devices. the documentation was horrible, and didn't even approach any what-ifs in the deployment of the asset. Sometimes, the engineers need to write the manuals and not create a disposable item because they are too lazy to document the product fully.
Summary - Good idea, but debugging requires patience and imagination, as the documentation is lacking in detail (or, consistent with their products). But, once stable, works fine.
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Check the printer compatibility list first!, November 19, 2005
By Bill Clark (Vermont, USA and elsewhere)
I actually bought mine from Circuit City (after crashing and burning trying to get a Linksys print server to work). After struggling w/ the Netgear box for a couple of hours, and wandering about their support site, I stumbled across this page: [...]
It is a seemingly-comprehensive listing of printers that are compatible...and a list of those that are NOT compatible (I found my HP Laserjet 1000 on that list).
Nothing on the box or in the product descriptions I saw made any reference to such a list...it was just for "USB printers". So...caveat emptor.
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Great after you figure it out- tech support and documentation sucks, September 24, 2005
By Sultry (So Cal Baby, CA)
4* for product 1* for support from Netgear. I use this Print Server as a client to my Linksys Wireless WRT54G router, to network to my Canon MP780(very good product as well). Router works great but documentation and tech support from Netgear sucks. It's one of the few PS that works with this printer even though it is not listed on their "official support page". However it may be difficult to get Netgear's product and your system configured due to poor documentation and support on Netgear's behalf. IF you configured your router for MAC filtering.. MAKE sure you enter both the wired and wireless MAC address for the Netgear router to your access point router. It's not documented well, but that is how you can get PC's to submit jobs wirelessly your Canon MP780 via the Netgear's Print Server. IF THIS was documented well in Netgear's documentation and if the tech support staff knew, it would have saved me a few hours and my submission for an RMA! I had to Google this issue and found some clues to figure out what could be wrong. Enjoy!
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Great for what I need it to do -- router bridging, August 31, 2005
By Gene Koo (Cambridge, MA)
This review is focused on a very specific and perhaps quirky need of mine:
I stumbled on this product while looking for a way to bridge to my landlord's wireless network while still keeping my own computers wired to each other. This is one of the few, or perhaps only, wireless bridge routers out there -- and with a print server to boot. I had considered the Linksys WRT54G because there are open-source firmware revisions out there that allow it to do what I just described. But support for doing so is thin, and requires a lot of patience and skill on the user's part.
Well, this product bridges perfectly to my landlord's wireless network (with his permission, of course!) with NO hitches whatsoever. His network is protected by WPA-TKIP (PSK), which is currently one of the strongest security protocols available for home wireless networking. The specific product I bought already has the latest firmware installed (earlier versions apparently did not support WPA-TKIP -- if you have one of these, upgrade your firmware!)
On top of this, the print server works OK with our Canon Pixma IP5000. Very time I print I get an error that "bi-directional communication" needs to be enabled, and eventually I'll see if that can be fixed, but printing works anyway. I do recommend checking the Netgear list of printers guaranteed to work - mine was not on the list, but I found that at least one other person had success with the same printer after doing a search on the company's official support forum, which I recommend if you don't see your printer on the list.
In short, so far so good, though I'll write an update if things change. Five stars Netgear!
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Check their website FIRST, August 21, 2005
By William B. Clark (Lompoc, CA. USA)
I usually recommend Netgear so I've got no axe to grind here.
1. The documentation is flat out useless. I've seen more amature documentation, but I've also seen junk with better.
2. How do you release a product that doesn't support printers that Linksys' uber inept WPS54GU2 does? For that matter, why would you produce a product that has such a small list of supported printers? Isn't it a clue when your unsupported list is larger than your supported list?
3. The setup (largly due to the senseless documentation) was not much worse than the WPS54GU2. If you think thats a good thing, try the WPS54GU2. At least it mostly works. This kind of product is exactly the kind that will keep me from mentioning Netgear when someone asks. It doesn't engender trust in their other products and its the kind of product that pretty much makes me look at other products the next time I buy. Indeed, I'll have to look elsewhere for a competent print server.
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Trick needed for MAC/OSX printserving; 2x price of Motorola WPS870G, July 16, 2005
By P. Benda (Virginia)
I have a wirelss network w/3 pc's, one Mac Powerbook, w/netgear router, and now the WGPS606 netgear printserver (my motorola WPS870G was half the $$$ and easier to set up on my Powerbook, but got killed by lightning storm yesterday); I have an old laserjet & HP officejet d145. Contrary to rumors, you can get the WPS870G to printserve wirelessly from Mac/OSX through the network (i.e., powerbook is wireless, printserver is also wireless)
1-I set a dedicated IP address in my router to associate w/my printserver...To do this: in 192.168.0.1 (which is the router) I renewed IP addresses, looked into the router's assignment table, and figured out that the printserver was at 192.168.0.4, so I just assigned it to 192.168.0.4; to do the assignment, you also need the device (i.e., the printserver's) MAC address; that's the trick...the MAC address on the netgear printserver is called the "device" or "hardware" MAC address, and it's the number printed on the box itself; if you go to the printserver ip address (in my case, 192.168.0.4), you find netgear's set up pages for the printserver; the printserver has two mac addresses, the 2nd is called something like the `wireless' MACaddress; that wireless MAC address (which is only different by one digit at the end) is what you use when you set up a dedicated IP address for the print server; when you've done all this, you should probably go back into 192.168.0.1 (your router set up pages) try to renew ip addresses to see if the assigned printserver address (in my case, 192.168.0.4) shows up and shows up with the right MAC address
3- when setting up a new printer in printer set up utility, you select IP Printing + LPD/LPR, printer address is your new ip address that you assigned (192.168.0.4 in my case) and queue name is L1 (presumably L2 if you have a second printer)
btw, you may need to upgrade the driver (I needed an HPIJS driver for my multi-function HP d145); the original driver didn't even install from the cd
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It's going back, June 10, 2005
By Robert M. Bailey (Clearwater, FL United States)
After spending at least 4 hours trying to get this thing to work, I give up. Netgear support was no help. The guy told me if my printer was not on their list of supported printers on the website, it would not work. They have like only 30 printers listed. I could ping the print server but never get anything to print.
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It just works, May 26, 2005
By Neurosion (Boston, MA)
The setup couldn't have been easier. I'm now sharing my printer with two Win32 wireless boxes and my Linux box, and managed to get my Linux box on my wireless network in the bargain, without the configuration hassle of 3rd-party wireless drivers and wpa_supplicant.
Also, people considering a wireless gaming adapter should turn here instead. For the same (or less!) money, you can get a far more useful product that achieves the same goals with less hassle.
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Very easy setup - reliable so far..., May 17, 2005
By Mac, Win & Linux user (Middletown, RI United States)
It took me less than 10 minutes to set up the WGPS606 on my home network (5 OS X Macs, 1 PC) using web-based configuration (http://198.162.0.102).
The server quickly detected and connected to my existing wireless network. Signal strength of 65% (length of house & separate floors) gives us very good WAN/LAN connection speed. WEP encryption setup was simple.
I was able to connect an Epson R200 to one of the 2 USB ports, and had that running well in only a few minutes.
My advice: Ignore the Wizard setup option. Use the web-based option instead, and just refresh the DHCP on each computer that you hang from the switch. It's that easy.
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Good Product, But Setup Could Be Easier and Less Buggy, May 4, 2005
By J. Cordes
The Netgear WGPS606 has a LOT of bang for the buck. 2 USB ports AND a 4-port switch/wireless bridge is a lot to pack in to such a normal priced wireless print server.
The unit is small and stylish, and can be set vertically or horizontally, as well as mounted to a wall.
The included setup CD gave me some problems, but a quick visit to Netgear's support site showed me there was an updated install program that fixed the hang-ups.
Somebody not familiar with networking could get a little lost in the setup process. When installing, the software asked me to assign an IP address and subnet to the print server, and started me out with all zeros. If an IP or subnet is entered that is not compatible with the router, the software tells you so (not why), and then lets you continue with the incompatible settings. I imagine tech support will get many calls from inexperienced users asking what address they need to assign.
The documentation is thin in other areas too. While many other companies take the time and space to explain to you why bidirectional settings don't work with any print server, Netgear makes absolutely no mention of it. Since almost all modern printers at least monitor ink levels by default, this was a glaring omission from Netgear's FAQ's, and will likely frustrate and confuse people new to print servers.
I had no problem setting up the print server to handle my WEP security, but I haven't tested the WPA-PSK support yet.
The WGPS606 looks good, has some better than average features like an extra USB port and switch/bridge, and it works well...once it's all set up. If you know of (or how to find) your network's basic settings, and don't mind the possibility of having to attempt setup 2 or 3 times to get it to work, the WGPS606 is a great value.
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