The Belkin Home Base Home Networking In A Box

Home Network Printer and File Sharing In One Simple Box

Sep 20, 2009

For those wanting a simple yet feature rich way to set up a wireless home network the Belkin Home Base makes it easy to share printers, share files, and backup computers.

Belkin has always been a leader in home networking and computer accessories, and their new Belkin Home Base product promises to make things even easier. The Belkin Home Base functions in many ways like a wireless USB hub, allowing a user to connect printers and external hard drives wirelessly to any computer in the home. Here are just a few of the useful features that the Belkin Home Base promises to provide.

Wireless File Sharing and Data Backup With The Belkin Home Base

The Belkin Home Base can take any portable USB hard drive such as the Seagate Free Agent Go or others and share it on the wireless network. Even computers without wireless connectivity can access the files on the external USB hard drive if they are connected to the home's wired Ethernet network.

In addition to making it very easy to share files between computers the Belkin Home Base also promises to be able to automatically back up connected computers to the connected hard drive on a regular basis. Each computer must be set up with the included software but even mixed networks with both Macs and Windows machines can share and backup their files easily. The unit also provides a built in feature that allows photos to be automatically uploaded to Internet photo sharing sites such as Flickr and Picasa.

Wireless Printer Sharing With The Belkin Home Base

One of the problems with sharing a printer in Windows or on the Mac is that the computer must be left on all of the time if other computers are to be able to print to the attached printer. The Belkin Home Base includes a built in print server component that performs this same function, but without requiring a host computer and using a fraction of the power needed by a computer. Any USB printer can be made available to other printers in the home simply by plugging in the cord to the back of the Belkin Home Base.

Pros and Cons of the Belkin Home Base

While overall the Belkin Home Base sounds like a great way to quickly and easily network and share multiple devices there are some things to consider that some users may find important in their buying decision.

Firstly, the Belkin Home Base uses two built in internal antennas. Although no data is available right now regarding how powerful the unit is, internal Wi-Fi antennas tend to have reduced range and signal strength, especially through dense building materials such as concrete.

Secondly, the Belkin Home Base is not a router. While it can connect to up to one wired network computer the user must purchase a separate router if the Belkin Home Base is to be used between multiple wired computers in the home or if it is to be used to send data to an Ethernet based networked printer.

Despite these two rather minor deficiencies the Belkin Home Base is a solid, well designed home networking product that will solve many problems as well as greatly simplify home network usage.

The copyright of the article The Belkin Home Base Home Networking In A Box in Computer Hardware/Accessories is owned by Chad Criswell. Permission to republish The Belkin Home Base Home Networking In A Box in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Oct 20, 2009 9:38 AM

Guest :

I purchased the Belkin Home Base recently. It is nice and works pretty much as advertised. I was happy that I was able to print and scan to my printer hooked up to the Home Base. The only issue I have is getting it to detect the printer. There is a configuration setting for the Home Base which is something along the lines of "connect to the printer as needed then disconnect" I don't remember the exact wording. The issue I have is it's not always working on all my computers so I end up manually connecting to the printer in the Home Base Configuration.