not for a router it isn't. most commoidty routers are about 125Mhz. As you go up in price, you get more ram and more powerful CPUs. These tend to be better performers. The highest i've seen, except getting into 4 digit cost cisco-type gear, is like 400Mhz, which is still actually aimed at ISPs, but for low cost wireless networking across significant distances. So yea, 200Mhz is not stone age. For a PC yes, for a commodity router, it's quite fine.

this is actually quite a bad idea. If you get a rootkit installed, it can be impossible to install any kind of cleaning software (firewalls, AV, anti-malware, etc.) or when it's installed, it can be neutralized. Rootkits give that code root access to your computer, and there is nothing you can do to clean it other than wipe and install. The prevalence of them in a Windows environment makes it very important to install anti-malware software and keep it checking in real time. This definitely hits gaming performance when making harddrive writes, but is the safest way to operate by far.

sorry i was thinking computers lol

argumentum ad verecundiam, appeal to authority.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_authority

now I hold a middleground between you and eviltechie. It's not the worst, they are a decent manufacturer, but they are far from the best at producing networking equipment, regardless of his father getting it on the stock market. Their IPO wasn't focused on routers if I'm not mistaken.

It's not stone age, a consumer router doesn't necessitate intense processing speeds. It sounds like a little overkill actually. As Bear stated earlier he is running a 486 computer for a router, at 66Mhz. These machines only generally have to perform up to layer 3 processing.

Speaking of D-link. I had a router of theirs once, and it worked great while it was in use... I retired it, and then a couple months tried to use it and it was toast...

they're better than netgear anyway, at least in my experience...

My only firewall is from Microsoft (SP2, I think?)... Is that a bad thing?

It's not a very good thing... The MS firewall only filters inbound traffic. Outbound traffic can be bad too (say a bad program gets on your comp, you don't want to infect others or it to steal your info).


Zonealarm is free and works well. It's painless once you get it configured (every program has to ask you for access).

Eh.. the reason I don't like firewalls beside the MS one is that I can't host any games on "Starcraft". I'll get one anyways and try to configure it.

Yeah starcraft can be a pain that way.I've actually been at lans where people's MS firewall was causing conflicts and my zone alarm wasn't. It's all in knowing how to work it.

I simply use the Windows XP if need be; albeit I may be under-protected, I found that some professional firewalls ended up trying "too much" and ended up hindering my computer altogether :/