Product Reviews

Wireless home networks are extremely useful, and not just for sharing broadband internet throughout your house. If you own a USB printer, adding a wireless print server such as this one from Belkin will allow you to print from anywhere as well - very handy if you use a notebook PC.

It connects to your printer with a standard USB cable and to your home network either wirelessly or using a standard Ethernet cable. It has two USB ports, so you can connect two printers at once. We tested it using a Canon i350 printer.

Setting up the server to use a wired network is

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simple: plug it in, run the setup wizard and you've done it. Unfortunately, adding the server to a wireless network is much more difficult. Belkin's setup wizard will try to connect to any wireless networks automatically, but it works only if the network doesn't use any security measures. If your home network uses WEP encryption - and it should - the process is more complicated. There are instructions in the manual to help you, but we expected this kind of setup to be explained in the installation guide.

To set up wireless encryption you have to connect to the server using an Ethernet cable, log into its web interface and enter your network details before switching to wireless. Next, you need to configure your PC. Unfortunately, the setup program was unable to set up our PC correctly, so we had to add a network printer port manually. Belkin's manual provides information on how to do this, but it's still annoyingly difficult.

Essentially, this is a decent product that's marred by poor documentation. If you know your way around wireless networking and printer ports then it's worth considering, but if it's all new to you then this is one to avoid.