Review on NETGEAR PS101 Mini Print Server by Willie Ogunlana

I have to say I was not impressed at all with this product. I originally bought it because of its size (it's relatively small) and the fact that I have an old parallel port laser printer (HP LaserJet 6P). My main issue with the product was its unreliability when completing a print job. . Whatever I send to the printer, there is about a 50% chance that I will actually see the result. This drops to around 10% to 20% when two or more jobs are sent at the same time (what's the use of a print server if you can't print more than one job at a time?). I should note that this happens whether you're printing from Windows 2000, OS X, or Linux (lpr or CUPS). My guess is that printer support is questionable, but NetGear makes it hard to know which printers work and which don't. Unfortunately, trying it out often helps. I'm pretty sure the printer is ok because when I use the computer to share the printer (via printer sharing) I never lose jobs and everything works fine. The job loss would not be such a problem if all the prints were completed. from the same room as the printer (because it would be easy to tell when something needs to be printed again). However, we have two wireless laptops in our family, and it's always inconvenient to walk into the office to make sure a print job gets done right away, rather than relying on it being done to pick it up later. .Another complaint I have is that the device loses its configuration fairly regularly. I've found that if I turn it off, there's about a 20% chance that it will factory reset. This is a pain for me as I print from OS X and Linux who like to have a static IP address for the printer. When the device resets, it loses its IP address and all of a sudden I can't find the printer. The only reason I didn't give this product a star is because it only works half as well if it doesn't lose a print job and actually saves its configurations. All in all, if you're like me and don't want to be constantly tweaking, poking, poking, etc. to get something working, or if you can print from outside of the immediate vicinity of the printer, I'd spend the extra money and hit the Lay the table and have something that works reliably.