D-link DIR-601 router

My old belkin wireless G router never communicated well with my hp laptop or my nintendo wii. It finally stopped communicating well with my macbook - the final straw!

I purchased the cheapest replacement router I could find at staples. A D-link DIR-601 wireless N router. It was on sale for 40$. The caveat was that it was only 150Mbit throughput and not the full 300?

Anyhow, as almost all of my devices only use type G still, it didn't matter to me about type N throughput. So i picked it up and expected it to just work ought of the box. It did not.

I don't mean the wireless did not work. I could not get internet to come through any sort of wired connection through this router. I tried using the cd it came with (I never recommend trying the cd from a router) but i could not even get the cd to run on my hp laptop running vista.

Let's detail my specs.

ISP: Shaw communications in Sidney BC, Canada.
Router: D-link DIR-601
OS: Windows Vista SP-(Whatever is current)
(I also tried on my macbook running snow leopard)

To access the html interface for this router the IP is http://192.168.0.1/
(plug that address into your browser, eg firefox, internet explorer, chrome, safari etc)

anyhow, I started poking around inside the router and I noticed that all of the IPs and mac addresses and all those weird numbers that I hardly understand were mostly zeros or otherwise clearly not appropriate.

So the internet was not even getting into my router (but if i bypassed the router I got internet from my modem - so the router was indeed the problem)

The time of all this was about 1am. Needless to say my brain at 1am was hoping for a quick solution and I gave up easily.

at 9am the next morning - voila idea!

Firmware update!!!

The dir-601 comes with firmware 1.00 but 1.01 is available online. the link to get it is

http://www.dlink.com/dir-601 and snoop around or.... directly at

ftp://ftp.dlink.com/Gateway/dir601/Firmware/dir601_firmware_101NA.zip

So I updated the firmware and immediately everything started working as its supposed to.

Cheers!!!

Tip for updating firmware:

The router does not want the zip file. It wants the .bin file thats inside... So unzip the firmware update and only upload the .bin file inside to the firmware updater.


Feel free to leave comments or email me for help with this router