Review on 📶 D-Link DIR-645 Wireless-N Whole-Home Router (Discontinued by Manufacturer) by Mike Cooper

I recently set up my DIR-645 and wanted to share what I learned during the setup. Many reviewers complained that the installation CD didn't work for them and they had to do a manual install. If you follow the installation disk, you will be taken through a series of steps and one of the first steps will ask you to "unplug" the cable. or DSL modem. It then forces you to plug in cables etc until you get to a step where it asks you to turn on your new wireless router and then attempts to set itself up automatically. Well, like many others at this stage. I couldn't, and then they told me to contact tech support, didn't they. There was a button to try again. Instead of calling tech support in another country, I just plugged in my cable modem and tried again and it went through all the steps again and completed the setup with no issues. When I got to step 7 at the end, it FINALLY told me to plug in my cable modem! (Of course it was already connected back then). He completed this last step and everything worked. I suspect this is a problem people have with the installation disk. It makes absolutely no sense for a wireless router to be able to detect the Internet settings of your switched off cable or DSL modem and configure itself! that's common sense. Of course, when the cable modem is turned off, the ISP settings are not available for the wireless modem, so it cannot configure itself. Good. Let us continue. After setup, I had 1Gbps on my desktop PC over Ethernet and 146Mbps on my son's laptop with a Wireless-N adapter and 54Mbps with my netbook and his Wireless-G adapter. I then configured the router in my browser and set up opendns to filter my internet from pornography etc. I found this to be very easy to set up. I already had an opendns account and just went to Parental Controls in the left menu and selected the Parental Control option and then configured the opendns settings by logging into my opendns account and applying the filters and the router became automatic added to the account's opendns entry and set the DNS server to access the router without my involvement. If you don't have an opendns account, you can create one easily and for free. This is a great way to filter your entire network, including tablets and game consoles in addition to your computers. There are many other router settings available that I have yet to use. I have a small house (1400 square feet). .), but I get excellent coverage around the house. I used a Linksys G router before and only had 4 lanes in the living room where the router is (5 lanes total) and 1-3 lanes in other rooms of the house. Now I have 5 bars in the house. I watch a lot of movies on Amazon Prime and now have great speed with no dropouts. I'm not sure why there are so many reviews here with some saying it has great quick coverage and others saying it has horribly poor coverage. I suspect, as one of the early reviewers said, that other competing signals from neighbors etc. are causing dropouts because their router is looking for an open connection that isn't being used and it has nothing to do with the router itself. I live in a small town and have only a few weak signals from my neighbor routers and never get any interference or have had any signal loss issues on my old router or this new one. Overall I am very happy with the router, it was easy to set up, it increased coverage and speed and I had no issues with it.