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Review on πŸ” Rejuvenate Your Wi-Fi Network with the NETGEAR Renewed R8000-100NAR Nighthawk X6 AC3200 Tri-Band Gigabit Wi-Fi Router by Becky Gallegos

Revainrating 5 out of 5

Old dog learns a new trick

When we significantly upgraded our Internet service, it became clear that we would need a new modem, but little did I know that our old router would be a bottleneck. Ethernet-connected devices had screaming speeds, but our Wi-Fi was just as pathetic as ever. I did some research and decided to stick with the Nighthawk series and liked what I read about it. I've believed in refurbishment for a very long time and was happy to see a refurbished Netgear unit in stock and buy it. Wi-Fi devices now have great speeds, but I confess we ended up having to move the router. The original placement was too far at one end of the house (because of the position of the modem I think) and we always struggled with a not-so-efficient power strip to try and get it working. It was never really satisfactory for certain parts of the house, even on the best of days. I confess that I was hoping for a miracle of coverage from this router, but it didn't happen. We've drilled holes and twisted cables and brought it to a more central location, and now it's a joy for all types of devices. Here's my only recommendation: It's tri-band, so it creates three different "sub-routers", one 2.4GHz and two different 5GHz routers. They're tailored to work with different types of (remember: vintage) hardware, so we just ran a quick speed test on each device after logging into each of the three virtual routers, and one of the three was for each Device always much faster. . We then went into the settings on each device and disabled "Auto-Connect" for the two slower virtual routers to save us the headache of forgetting which is which and constantly unintentionally connecting to one of the slower ones. Perhaps we could have avoided this step by opting for the router's auto-discovery feature, but a deep Neanderthal instinct made me distrust it, which is why I didn't enable that feature during the initial setup. Right now I look like a hero in our house, so what's not to like?

Pros
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Cons
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