On first blush the purple and black BEFSR41 is smaller than what you see. It's a little bigger than a stack of CD's. But the five RJ-45 connectors on the back and a rack of orange and green LED's on the front really means business. It gets its power from a power 'brick' ala portable computer style. It is also a feature power-house. Four switched 10/100 full-duplex ports, IP filtering, DHCP, NAT, IP Port Forwarding (good for servers), DMZ hosting (good for game servers) and Virtual Private Network support. It also has a few firewall features, and I'll get into those shortly. What's not to love, man?

Setup Once working at 100Mb/s full-duplex, in other words, FULL SPEED!!!, it's really just a simple thing to set the router up. Basically not much harder than, say, ordering MechWarrior 4 online (I've got to stop these shameless plugs...). My Linksys came with a firmware version 1.30, which didn't last long. Write down you're settings before you flash your router a new firmware, as you'll lose them. I recommend upgrading to 1.34 or to 1.36 (http://www.linksys.com ). Most new Cable and DSL connections use PPPoE. PPPoE stands for Point to Point Protocol over Ethernet and it's the same type of connection that a regular 56K modem uses but works over Ethernet instead of a phone line. Linksys's firmware version 1.35 gets the 'stay-the-hell-away' award, and v.1.36 is the newest, and is best for PPP users out there. I'm lucky enough to have a fixed IP, where my IP address doesn't change like PPP connections, so I stayed with v.1.34. After flashing the Linksys a new firmware all that was necessary was to put in my gateway address, DNS addresses, and change the default password, and I was off to the 'net to... uh, check out some bare nekkidness! And make sure to change the password! One word (more than that, actually) on setting up email accounts. I don't know what ya'll use for email, but I'm happy with Netscape's Messenger. May Vishnu have mercy on you if you use Outlook or AOL. I shudder even to type that...ewww. Anyway, the Linksys router, because of it's firewall functions, requires you to precisely determine the IP addresses of your mail servers. Follow the manual (now, where did I put that?) and with a little PING action, is all it takes to get swingin' in no time!