other

If your doing Digital Video and transporting files between computers than you need this. As you know DV files are huge and transfer time takes away from development time. The less time you spend transferring files (i.e. burning DVDs & CDs, Ethernet, whatever) the more time you can be creative and in tight production schedules this is invaluable. My first transfer (after hours of trying to get it to work, more on that later) was a 738MB Avi and it transferred in about 41 seconds, that's 18MB/sec or 144Mb/sec. Whoa!!! All I can say is that I'm happy.

Now the reason for 4 stars and not 5 is probably due to my little to no knowledge of networking. I followed the instructions and the install went smoothly. I had a connection and everything, but for the life of me I could not get the Windows XP and Windows 2000 Workgroup to function correctly. They could see each other but I would always get a permissions type of error. After many hours of trying this and trying that from posts on newsgroups about workgroups in windows I finally just called the support line and Greg had me up and running in 10 minutes. He just had me Map a network drive on both machines and like magic it worked. If you'r having trouble do this:

-assign IP addresses 192.168.10.1 and 192.168.10.2 to the other.
-be sure you can ping the ip addresses (be sure to shutdown zonealarm on both machines ->right click system tray icon)
-open windows explorer, tools->Map Network Drive
In folder type \\"ip address"\"folder name"
for example \\192.168.10.2\shared-folder
-be sure the folder is shared and you're good to go.

I mentioned to Greg that maybe they should include this in the pdf file that comes with the download. Hopefully they'll update it.

I spent 2 hours trying to connect XP and W2K machines using FireNet with no luck. I eventually gave up, since it's not worth the hassle.

This is an impressive product. Assuming that you have Firewire
ports on your PC's (and most high end machines do, or buy a cheap PCI card) Firenet beats Ethernet (10/100)hands down.
Great for video transfers and gaming. The set-up is a bit of a hassle, otherwise 5*