I took advantage of John Lewis' technology clearance shelves in their Peter Jones store yesterday, and spent £25 on a new DSL router for the house network.

While switch to DSL Max a while back had sped up our network connection a fair bit, I wasn't entirely sure that we were getting the best out of the available connection. To be honest, the fact that Linksys hadn't fixed the VPN bug in there firmware which meant that a PPTP connection wouldn't traverse the NAT mappings was also a problem. So when I saw a D-Link DSL-G624T for not very much at all, I decided it was worth trying a swap out. After all, this was a router that was designed for ADSL 2+ connections, instead of my old ADSL 2 hardware.

Setting up the new router wasn't quite as easy as my previous Zyxel and Linksys devices, but once I'd understood how it mapped NAT connections for my servers, I was able to get it up and running in fairly short order. While web pages seemed a little snappier, it wasn't until I decided to download a DVD image from the US that I saw things had really improved - I was getting sustained download speeds of over 750KB/s, rather than the (still respectable) 400-500KB/s I'd been getting before.

I think I managed to get a little bit of a bargain there.