Gareth Jones

To cut a long story short, I’ve sent the D-Link 655 that I got just over a week ago back to the retailer which, coincidentally, cost me £13.85 because I had to send it back to bloody France! Nope, I seriously won’t be buying from PIXmania again.

The reason for sending the unit back is simple; though actually diagnosing the problem was far from it. Having hooked the D-Link up to my Netgear DGN2000 which was now running in modem-only mode, my internet download speed dropped from 20mbit to 10mbit. Because it wasn’t actually the D-Link that was dialling up, this unit wouldn’t give me any connection details other than “connected” (which was far from helpful) so I had to disconnect that and connect to the Netgear directly in order to access its webmin and check the details on there. The Netgear reported a 20mbit connection, and yet whenever I downloaded anything on any of the computers, I was getting 250kb/sec max.

It turns out that the D-Link was establishing a mere 10mbit connection to the Netgear (the D-Link being a gigabit unit and the Netgear being a 100mbit unit), so no matter how fast my internet connection was I was only ever going to get 10mbit from it. I set the D-Link to force a 100mb connection and when that didn’t work I tried the gigabit option, which also didn’t do anything. Hardly performance that you’d call “Xtreme”, is it, D-Link? There was no such option on the Netgear. I disabled QoS, packet shaping, UPnP and everything else that was there to be disabled but no, nothing made any difference so I logged into PIXmania, found my order and requested an RMA number. I wrapped the D-Link back up in its French SKU box and prepared it for posting. I then did what I now wish I had done at the beginning and ordered a gigabit switch, which I’d use to connect everything to the router and get the best of both worlds – a gigabit internal network and a 20mbit internet connection.

I connected everything back up to the Netgear for now and put that back in modem/router mode, only to find that this was now playing up and refusing to issue a DHCP IP address to one of my computers. Also, one of its ports refused to work with any device. I’d had another Netgear router do this to me 18 months ago – the DG834G – which was what I’d replaced with the DGN2000. Really angry at this point, I binned the Netgear, vowed never to buy any of their crap again and hooked up the old Thompson router that we got from O2 a year ago. Everything connected to that without any problems.

The gigabit switch arrived a few days ago and so far everything with the internal network is fine, though there is an issue with O2′s router which I’m hoping a replacement router from O2 will fix, but I’ll write about this separately as it appears that a number of others are experiencing the same thing.

Hassle, hassle and yet more hassle!

After my banning from the MDM support forums for pointing out that Zinc V3 is a load of rubbish, MDM pruned the forums of multiple posts that had anything negative to say about the software and closed down the bug reporting page:

We have currently suspended new Bug Submissions whilst we compile and validate existing entries. Thank you for your patience.

Evidently, the only way MDM is able to reduce their bug count is to prevent people from being able to report them in the first place. Likewise, the only way they’re able to have a forum of satisfied customers is to delete every negative post as it comes in. Let this serve as a warning to anyone thinking about buying anything from MDM.

On the positive side, the entire conversation was saved before it was deleted by Gambini and is provided here for posterity: Page 1, Page 2.

As you can see, Gambini seems to be of the opinion that if a large organisation has been sucked in by his false advertising, the ridiculous bug level of his software is irrelevant. He also seems to believe that unless you have a multi-million selling product that your opinion on software that you’ve paid good money for is worthless. Furthermore, should you dare to ask questions about this, you will be banned.

Is this is a company that you want to support?