Netgear's PS101 A Solid Option for the Technically Minded

While pricing made this product very attractive, and configuration was a breeze, the slightly larger-than-a-print-cable-connector size of the product could make it chancy to install on your printer. Its internal cache is only 256KB, so if you want good performance you must have plenty of RAM in your printer.

Attaching the box to a Laserjet 5P required some cutting of the case in order to accomodate the rather large size of the unit (assuming a parallel cable was to be avoided, which was part of the product design).

Initially, printing worked fine from one Windows XP system and one Windows 2000 system, but a third Windows 2000 system - configured identically to the successful system! - printed all pages overprinted on a single page.

Netgear Technical Support could not resolve out the issue, and although I was promised a call from their level 2 technical support within 4 hours, no call was ever received on that day. It took two weeks and an exchange of emails for a level 2 technician to continue the resolution process.

The problem was finally traced to outdated printer drivers supplied with Windows 2000. After updating the driver from HP's web site the overprinting problem went away. The Laserjet 5P has 26MB RAM so performance is excellent.

Attaching the print server to an HP Deskjet 5550 gave poor results in the performance category. Printing from Internet Explorer resulted in long browser hangs for simple 2-page documents with only moderate graphics, undoubtedly because of the small amount of RAM in the printer itself.

In summary, performance is unpredictable and the size of the device can make installation a challenge. However, connected to the right printer - if the printer contains plenty of cache RAM - the product can be made workable. However, if you're going to rely on Netgear's technical support, you will be taking a chance that your issue may not be resolved for weeks.