Set-up & Performance - Installation was a breeze. For our first test, I decided to do a simple two-computer network through the USB to USB connection with GeneLink. We first installed the required drivers on both of our test computers and after plugging in the USB cable, the network was up and running. 

It actually took us less than 7 minutes even taking into account the time it took for our comps to restart after driver installations. Simply the fastest and easiest network setup I have ever seen. Good thing we already had a two-computer Ethernet network ready to do a comparison with, because it would have certainly taken much longer to setup that one up.

Right after both computers restarted, both comps appeared in the Windows 98 Network Neighborhood, with gibberish names, which I later changed for ease of distinction. After manually sharing the drives on both computers, we were ready to send and receive files as well as share the printers and scanners. Being the benchmark freak that I am, I almost immediately fired up Sandra Sisoft to benchmark the network throughput (transfer speed).

As you can see, although not by a whole lot, our GeneLink’s file transfer speed was slower than the 10/100 Mbps Ethernet solution. Nevertheless, it is more than what I was expecting and in any case, a throughput of 800 kB/s+ is perfectly suitable for the average home user. Files as large as 80MB can be easily transferred without much wait time. Larger files such as 200MB will take a little bit of patience but still reasonably fast.