A Cable Modem Wireless Router Shopping Guide - Technology - Gadgets and Gizmos

If you're shopping for a cable modem wireless router, the first instinct may be to head to the local computer parts or office good store and just grab the cheapest thing there.

Resist that impulse! Here are some simple steps to follow when shopping for the best wireless routers...

1- Read a lot of reviews

There are dozens and dozens of good, great, bad and useless wireless routers out there in every imaginable price range. So if you just grab the first and cheapest router you see, you may as well just take that money and buy thirty or forty lottery tickets with it, since you're really testing your luck.

We recommend first looking at message boards and forums to see what comes highly recommended, and second to read full reviews of those products to see if they live up to the hype.

2- Shop cheap

Maybe you have your eye on the Linksys wrt54g wireless router, but the Netgear wgr614 wireless router is on sale half price this week at your favorite online retailer? Get the Netgear. The truth is, a good router is a good router. It's not about favorite brands or anything, it's all about the quality of the router, and one good router is as good as another.

So we recommend writing a list. Write down every cable / modem router you might want to buy, compare prices, and get whichever one you can buy at the lowest price.

And of course, don't sacrifice quality for low cost. A crummy router that's half the price of a good one isn't a bargain unless you're actually getting something for your money.

3- Be on the lookout for older models

The funny thing about the price of a cable modem router is that it just keeps going down. A router released a year ago might still be as good as anything released just yesterday, but the nature of the computer market is to always go after the fresh new thing and dump the old stuff, even though the truth is that hardware actually takes years to become truly outdated.

So it's not hard at all to find great routers that are wireless on sale for half the price of the new ones, despite the fact that the performance between the two is practically identical.

So there you have it. Keep the above tips in mind and you should be able to get just the right router at just the right price.

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