Download torrents when your PC is off

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Download torrents when your PC is off

Hardware Roundup Asus spearheads PC-less devices

By Maurice Le Wibble: Tuesday 22 August 2006, 14:03

DOWNLOAD torrents with PC turned off. That's one of the, or rather the main selling point of the Asus WL-700gE Router. BT by itself is not illegal.. But... Anyway, this one is a multi function device that allows you to have a FTP server, a NAS, a multi Media device, a printer sharer and more. All wirelessly of course. You have to wonder what a computer is meant for after playing with one of those. It even comes with a 160GB HD. It is expensive and requires a PC for interaction. But I guess some guy at Asus is going to glue a 14-inch monitor at the back and bundle in a Wireless keyboard. Who needs a PC?

MFDDs Multi-Function Digital Devices
Putting all other MFDDs to shame is the ASUS WL-700gE. Officially its a wireless router (because its got to be called something, but thats like calling Arnold Schwarzenegger that guy with all the muscles. The truth is a lot more involved and complex.

The ASUS WL-700gE is more like a combination of a wireless router/gateway and a thin client system, and the feature-set is rich, rich, rich. Read on and make awe-inspired gasping noises at all the appropriate places.

Network protection is multi-layered. Two firewalls work to protect both the wired and wireless networks. Both firewalls are NAT and SPI-capable (Network Address Translation and Stateful Packet Inspection). This makes the WL-700gE at least as secure as any other wireless router/gateway on the home market.

Wireless communication can be secured with 64/128 WEP, TKIP, AES, WPA or WPA-PSK encryption, and authentication is handled by MAC address and MAC filtering, or 802.1x.

The unit comes with a 160GB IDE drive pre-installed. It only supports IDE, not SATA. There are also three USB 2.0 ports for hard drive expansion, printer connection or data copy from a USB flash drive. With a USB drive connected, it supports RAID levels 0 and 1 (striping and mirroring) all from a router!

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The front panel features all the power/activity LEDs for the unit, hard drive, LAN/WAN and wireless LAN ports. The LED status indicates what activity is occurring no LED means no connection, steady LED shows connection, and flashing LED means activity. There are two buttons on the front Power and Copy. Power turns on the system and mounts the hard drive, while Copy will transfer data from a connected USB storage device (like a hard drive or flash drive) to the internal hard drive.

The back panel sports the AC-in jack, the Reset button (hold for ten seconds to return to factory defaults), two USB 2.0 ports (three ports in total), one RJ-45 WAN port, four RJ-45 LAN ports (4-port switch), the wireless antenna jack, and the EZSetup button, which is used to launch the EZSetup application.

Apart from the highly impressive hardware feature set, the main attraction with the WL-700gE is its in-built operating system. Based on a minimalist Linux build, the onboard OS is embedded into the firmware and takes over the full capacity of the hard drive.

At a basic level, the router functions as an UPnP NAS device. The hard drive has a pre-defined file structure for downloads, music, photos, videos, web files, ASUS utilities and automated USB copies. The drive is available via UPnP once the initial router configuration has taken place. No special software is required to access the drive a connected client running TCP/IP, the Microsoft Client and the File and Print Sharing protocol (the basic Windows networking setup), will be able to connect. For Linux and OSX users, the router uses CIFS as its default network file protocol and it also supports NFS. In a worse-case scenario, the drives contents are also accessible via FTP or the routers web-based admin page.

Imagine all the porn you can download without even switching on your laptop or PC! Twisted Evil

http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/939/5/page_5_system_features_configuration/index.html