NetGear Hubs: Pleasure and Pain

NetGear equipment is funny. It's fairly reliable consumer-level network hardware for a decent price. I'd have to say that if I were to pick a hub out of the bunch to point to and say "Here. This is probably what you want," it's going to be a NetGear.

'cept there's a problem. NetGear really needs to do better product testing. Their equipment works great with your typical Windows 2000/XP/Server 2003 installs. But the hubs themselves will fail to recognize other operating systems. I've got a fresh install of Windows 98SE on a machine that one NetGear hub refuses to speak to. An older NetGear hub acknowledges it just fine. I've had this problem before with BeOS. I tried to return the hubs to the vendor but he didn't return my call.

So now I have to be careful about what I do with these NetGears. It looks like they only work with operating systems that the NetGear developers have heard of. I truly believe that network hardware should be operating system agnostic, but NetGear disagrees with me.

What I'd love to find is an 8-port 10/100 hub that works with every OS and that doesn't cost $300 or more.