I think Matt was talking about breadcrumbs for the check-out process when not using one-click.

But when you get to the page for the actual product, all that vanishes, which is less than useful.

Ah, right. I usually Cmd-click all item links to keep the search results / product list pages up in another tab, so that one doesn't bother me.

Yeah, I often go to Amazon with a specific product in mind, then I want to see what else is available and what gets good reviews. I think that in general they've gotten better with their breadcrumbs (probably homemade instead of store bought ).

I've also noticed that Amazon seems to be attempting weighted sorts of user reviews. One of the things I do more than anything else on Amazon is sort items by user reviews to see what the community thinks of the products. A year ago, such a sort would result in an initial page of 5-star products with 1 user review each. I'd then have to go to the second or third page to get a 4.7-star reviewed item with 300+ reviews for it. This was a constant annoyance with their interface. However, now it seems they've addressed that problem, though it still seems a little...off.


On another note, I just received two Monoprice switches (the items I ordered last Friday) - an 8-port and a 24-port, both gigabit. I'm quite impressed with the build quality, though the 24 port switch has pretty loud fans... Anything I might be able to do about that? It's going in a basement where it should be pretty cool. Is it possible to replace the fans in these things?

Hurry up and test it Matt, I need to put in a Monoprice order soon and would love to add that 24-port switch. I've been needing one for a long time now but was originally hoping to get something that supported teaming and jumbo frames. I think I'm just not going to bother with the potential extra headaches and keep it simple.

I've had a little mini rack and 24-port patch panel sitting here for almost 2 years waiting for a bigger switch. It just so happens that I'm doing some re-wiring over the next few days too, so this is good timing.

Heh, I'm not sure how to test it What would you like me to do? I currently have it hooked up to my router (thankfully, Fios now has gigabit routers with 802.11n), and the only thing that's connected to the switch is a long run to my family room where I have the 8-port switch (also gigabit) located for serving all the internet-connected devices in my home theater (currently just the Google TV and Tivo).

I will say that the switch seems sufficiently well-built for the price. It's a pretty nice piece of hardware. Basically, it seems better than the similarly-priced alternatives on Amazon, but I don't really have any way of knowing that.

Anyway, I'm thrilled that my entire network has the potential for 1000Mbps now, and the whole house is wired. Sweet.

If you previously had a gigabit switch and also had some file transfer benchmarks you might see if this new switch behaves any differently. Results are more relevant if you were already pushing some high numbers before like with a NAS. On the ReadyNAS forum for instance, some customers have had varying results with different model switches from different manufacturers.

If you have a supposed problematic device that does a lot of unnecessary broadcasts like the Boxee Box hooked up, can you report if there are any issues on your network that might not have been there before? Again, on their forums, some customers have seen any number of devices on their networks reacting poorly to all these queries/broadcasts from Boxee Box.

My main switch is already GigE, but it's only got 8 ports. This means that I have a few network jacks around the house that currently have no connectivity. Since I'll be adding more this week getting this switch now would be super convenient. I'm moving my office to a different room and adding new port location in master bedroom for a new SageTV extender location. I just have to figure out how to drop the cable from a hole in the mirror in the ceiling. Kidding.

Probably because it's not difficult to ship anything next-day in the UK - the distances are such that it can be trucked overnight to anywhere on the mainland.

When ordering items £50+ I usually get them within 1-2 days with the *free* Super Saver Delivery!

It's been a year plus since we installed a Trendnet 24-port "Green" GigE switch here. Works fine, fast, cool, quiet (no fans), built-in PSU (no "brick").. very power efficient and trouble free. Highly Recommended. 13W max compared with 30W on other switches (eg. Monoprice). Also, 48gb/s switching fabric compared with 32gb/s for Monoprice switch. Plus, 9-Kbyte jumbo frames capability.

http://ncix.com/products/?sku=58253&vpn=TEG-S24DG&manufacture=TRENDnet

It has come up "on sale" for $100 or so in times past.

-ml

SOLD. Except I think I'll grab it from Amazon. I can't believe I didn't consider the power consumption. 13w may even be lower than the Dell 8 port model I have now.

Yeah, I might return the Monoprice switch for that one, especially now that I've heard the fans...

btw.. We use that switch here with a mix of old cat5 and newer cat5e cabling, and it all works for us at GigE speed.

I have only cat5e in this house, so I don't anticipate any issues with the wiring. Found Newegg selling on eBay at the same price as Amazon so I'll probably go that route to avoid paying NY sales tax. Canadian tax will then be a total gamble, depending on how the customs officials are feeling that day.

I can't believe you guys need 24 ports in a house

I probably only need 12. But I'd rather have free ports than not enough ports (what I have now).

I have a lot of empegs.

More seriously, when I hook up a customer's rack mount "NAS" unit, that often chews up 4-8 ports all by itself. And my new thermostat (under development) will need one.

PLUS the empegs.

Likewise, I won't need all 24, but I'll need a good amount. For example, my house is wired (hooray!) with drops in 8 rooms, I believe. In the room where all my networking equipment is located, I'll also have my main desktop PC, a NAS, my Vera Lite (for home automation), and a couple other devices I'm forgetting at the moment. Additionally I'll frequently be working on peoples' computers, and it's always good to have wired connections for those.

But yeah, what Bruno said...

I have two of these 24 port switches in my house. No issues whatsoever, quiet, cool, just works.

These replaced a bunch of smaller 5, 8, 12 port switches, each of which probably used the same or more power.

It could be worse, I have 50 of them. I'm not saying this to brag, it's a simple fact. When I built my house, I wanted ethernet drops in every room. Usually more than one, like 3-4 per bedroom, 6 in the office room, 3 in the kitchen, 6 in the attic, 2 in the garage, even 2 in the garden house... All cables are Cat7.

Not all of those are for internet access. I have one connection in every room for Sonos. (I know I can do that wirelessly too, but I always prefer wired) Almost every room has a TV connection (coax), and there's an ethernet connection next to it for the uplink of the digital TV.

I know I could have used a switch in every room, but I didn't want to do this, for two reasons:
1) All those little switch boxes quickly clutter up a room with cabling
2) The power used by all those little switches would quickly add up
3) They would also occupy a power socket in every room.

So in essence, I think it looks a lot cleaner. It probably cost me a lot less as well (not in effort when laying the cables, but I only had to do that once) AND I have full bandwidth on every cable (you never know what that's good for).
All those cables come together in two 24 port patch panels in a rack cabinet. That rack cabinet also houses the switch, so it's very easy to switch ports, create VLANs and actually have them ordered physically in a logical order etc...

I could really use a 48 port smart switch, but I haven't found one so far that is fanless. So I'll probably go with 24 port switches for just this reason. I like the this D-link one. For now I'm still using an HP Procurve 1400-24, but that's not a smart switch.

That is genius. I do wish I had more ports in my home theater area. I now have my Tivo, Boxee Box, Google TV, and Vulkano (like the Slingbox) hooked up to the 8-port switch in my system, and it does add a bit of mess, takes up a power port, and uses power. Oh well, maybe in the next house

Awwww... big deal. I have four in my house, and I'm actually using three of them.

Somehow I suspect that my electronic situation just might be a bit less complex than yours!

It sounds like you have a great setup.

tanstaafl.

Hardly genius. Insanity, maybe. At least my electrician thought so. (but it was me who did all the work so he had no right to complain anyway )
If you ever get the chance to build your own house, I can strongly advise you to do this as well. You'll love the result, because it provides you an enormous amount of flexibility. You're almost as flexible with wired ethernet as you are with wireless. Very handy!


Thanks, I agree, I'm very happy with it. But I had the luxury of being able to design it from the ground up. I realise most people are not so lucky.

Edit: here's a pic of the cabinet. You can see the patch panels are actually Cat6 and so are the used patch cables. Cat7 patch panels were not available a year ago, at least not at consumer prices. (are they today?) This Cat6 panel works just as well. The orange cable is real Cat7 cable. In that back of the cabinet, you can see I didn't cut the Cat7 exactly up to length but kept a few feet extra, in case I ever wanted to reposition the cabinet.

Yeah, the best I could do was that we had a small unfinished storage room in the basement that was right under our living room where the home theater would go. Long story short, I needed to supply the workers who were finishing it with whatever cables I wanted run ASAP. All I had was enough CAT5e and speaker wire to run wires for one ethernet and two surround speakers, plus another speaker cable is a pull cord. I didn't even have any purpose for the ethernet, but I figured you could do worse than have CAT5 running place to place. Perhaps down the road I'll mount a flat screen TV on the wall and run HDMI over ethernet so I can put the equipment out of the way.

Anyway, the moral of the story is: more ethernet is better

Such a tiny little cute little country!

In our household, we like to joke that we think the English are quaint because they think 100 miles is a long distance, and that the English think we Americans are quaint because we think 100 years is a long time.

We've got four wall jacks for ethernet at the home theatre position. Very very useful there, and saves a switch and power dongle.

The only other place with tons of ports is my home office, where the switch resides. Most of the end devices are in the same room. We do have some runs to elsewhere in the house, but just single ports here and there.

Cheers

Sorry to take the thread back on topic... So one of my Amazon peeves just kicked in again today.

I added a TV to my cart a few days ago intending to order it this week. Bam, today it went up $22 (and change). Arrgh.

I'm not sure what you're blaming Amazon for here. Are you trying to say that you should be able to freeze a sale price on something in your shopping cart?

If you're concerned with price fluctuation, let me introduce you to the greatest site I've ever found for Amazon shoppers (which has one of my favorite site names ever): camelcamelcamel.com

On camelcamelcamel you can see the price history for nearly everything sold through Amazon. Then, you can set up alerts to tell you when items drop below a certain price. It's invaluable to my Amazon shopping experience. It's how I bought my new office printer, and I saved about $30 over the price I first saw it listed for.

Oh, sorry, this doesn't have anything to do with the fact I added the item to the cart. So I'm not complaining about expecting the cart price to be held, just that the prices seem to fluctuate kind of randomly and without notice.

I can understand if the product were listed in the market and fluctuates depending on seller. I can understand if the price a few days ago was promotional. Neither of those was the case.

The price when I added it to the cart was what I thought was Amazon's own "regular" price. Guaranteed to be the lowest price. Today it's almost $23 more. Still guaranteed to be the lowest.

Using that history site shows that the price jumps between the two amounts every couple of months. I would have pulled the trigger on Friday had I known it was about to go up. It just wouldn't have been as convenient.

Yeah, I can see that. I read an article recently about how companies will change the price of their products on Amazon based on what their competitors are doing, or something like that. It can be annoying, but I tend to not add something to my cart until I'm ready to buy it, otherwise it goes onto my wishlist. Then I'll use camelcamelcamel to alert me when it's at it's lowest historical price, so I feel like at least I've gotten it at as low a price as it's ever been. Rarely have I bought something at that alert price and then seen it go down from there.

The guarantee Amazon offers on TVs will refund you the difference if the price does go down later. Within a limited time period of course.