Review on IOGEAR 4 Port Automatic Printer GUB431 by Corey Krull

We have three of these switches connected to three clusters of Windows 7 Pro PCs. Each PC cluster uses an HP 5550 Laser Jet through a switch. Like many other 1 star reviewers, I found that the auto toggle feature didn't work most of the time. The most common errors were print jobs stuck in queues because the printer showed offline or the printer crashed while processing the job. We had to constantly unplug printers to reset them. No software or switch fiddling seemed to make a difference. We also found that a feature that temporarily locks the switch for PC doesn't unlock the switch for sharing again. We often had to remove all print jobs from the queue, unplug the switch completely, and plug it back in. Using software, even manually configuring the ports on the switch was unpredictable. When creating queues, I had to bypass the switch completely because the connection was very unstable. To answer one negative review about the software, I was able to run it at boot. Unfortunately, it doesn't do much good if it doesn't work. I finally decided to give up the software in favor of manually controlling the switches. This seems to work consistently as long as users set the port on the switch before sending a print job. Therefore, these IOGEAR switches are too expensive to be limited to manual control of unpredictable software. While there are positive reviews for this device, I wouldn't buy another based on the performance I've experienced with three separate devices. In fact, I'd have trouble convincing myself to use another auto-switching USB device from any brand, even though I've seen a model that got all the 5-star reviews. I will be buying another switch for the same project and it will be fully manual for about a third of the price. Hope that helps.