I've been pretty pleased with my Belkin. The cat's knocked it off the table a couple of times, and it still keeps working. (The cable modem keeps working, that is. The cat disdains work as is right and proper for his species.)

Our whole system is hodgepodge now. We have the Belkin router, 24-port D-Link wired gigabit switch, Linksys -n adapter to upgrade the SO's laptop. My VAIO came with n, which is another part of why we went the way we did. The switch was for all the wired outlets in the new house, which are super nice to have. We were dubious about whether or not we'd actually need them, with wireless hitting its peak when we were planning, but it's been handy to have reliable quick connections all over the place.

Oh, and we'll be replacing the router shortly with a Cradlepoint, which will play nicely with our cellular modem.

As soon as I'm not scrambling week to week for cash, I really need to dump the DSL service I've been getting for a while, and replace it with cable.

How do I change a shortname in OS X? The shop that repaired my laptop set me up as firstnamelastname, and I want it just to be firstname. I can change my user name, but the "shortname" stays long.

You will have to create a whole new account:

• Create a temporary, generic user account with admin privileges. Call it "admin"
• Log off completely as yourself, and log in as admin
• Create a new user account, ita.
• From the command line, type "sudo mv /Users/itasurname /Users/ita"
1. Type "sudo chown -R ita:ita /Users/ita" (This make take a while to complete).
2. Log off as admin, log in as ita, make sure everything is OK
• Delete the itasurname and admin accounts (if desired).

Thanks. I tried something like that, differing because I'd renamed the user directory to "ita" beforehand.

Looking good so far.

Grrr. I downloaded AVG 8.5 and now I get all of these popups. Very irritating, even after I uninstalled AVG.

Kindle DX. It looks all ST:TNG. But definitely not something you can stuff in a pocket or smallish bag. Expensive for bedside reading.

I did the math for a Kindle DX plus NYT subscription, and it pays for itself (in savings over a paper newspaper subscription) in 2.7 years for most of the country and 4.5 in NYC.

Then I realized that didn't make sense for anyone sharing a house, because it's really difficult to separate out the Week In Review and hand it to someone if you're reading the paper on a Kindle. So not really worth it for most people.

I think the killer feature of the DX for a lot of people, which they're not hitting hard enough, is the native PDF support without scrolling. That's means business and technical journals that are available in PDF (a LOT of them) will work on it, and it has a large enough screen to make it worth it.

Not something I need. Not something the average consumer needs, necessarily. But definitely something a large number of really geeky potential buyers were looking for.

The next killer feature, if they can work out deals, will be college textbooks.