Well, last night the rest of the family was out doing what they do on a Wed. Night which left me to putz around the house and do my own thing. Since they were all out I figured it was a good time to work on the network issue I had been having. To recap, I recently bought a Belkin Play dual band wireless N router for the house. It was much more powerful than my netgear wireless G router so it would cover the whole house. Now I do a lot of odd things on my network. I love to stream movies and music to the xbox or ps3 from my pc, I also picked up the software package PlayOn from Media Mall to stream Hulu and YouTube to the consoles as well. Ever since hooking up the Belkin, all that stopped. So last night poured over the settings inside and out, tested every scenario and flipped every switch. Nothing worked.

I googled the heck out of my situation and found a few posts about how the Belkin routers block the DLNA media streaming protocol. But nothing on how to fix that. So, off I went to the Belkin support site. Still no mention of blocking the DLNA protocol, except that the router itself will stream using DLNA, but only directly from the router. I tried to “Chat with a support representative” only to learn that they had no clue what DLNA was and was fixated on the ports of the xbox and the ip of my PC, even though I explained what the issue was. I gave the person (assuming it was even a human) 10 min to explain before I scrap the router and buy something else, she couldn’t even explain what DLNA was.

Needless to say, I then set out to Best Buy and purchased a new Netgear Wireless N Rangemax router. 10 minutes later my whole network was up and I was streaming again with no issues. Because of this, I will never buy another Belkin product again. Be Warned!

p.s. I am in training all this week (if you hadn’t seen the twitters) so reviews for Limbo and Risk will be put next week.