I was initially delighted with my 585 V7 as it synced much faster than my old box, a very old (by the modern definition of 'old') 3Com Officeconnect. Maybe if I compared it to something more modern, I'd have seen a less impressive speed gain.
But, happy as I was, after about a week, the 585 V7 froze requiring reboot. Then the same a couple of days later. Whatever's wrong it's getting worse as the freezes are now several times a day. So it's out of service and I've reinstalled my old 3Com while I think about what to do. A slow connection is heaps better than an unreliable one. I notice there's a later firmware, but Thomson don't make it easy to find updates, and they seem to offer no help at all installing them. In any case, I'm reluctant to believe that firmware probes would cause the problems I've seen, it's much more likely to be thermally triggered after the thing's warmed up for a few days.
The old 3Com served me well. A few weeks after it arrrived back in 2005, there followed another package (from Amazon) enclosing a spare PSU, and explaining they'd had a lot of failures and this was a spare. After about a year the original PSU did fail, on a Christmas Eve, leaving me high and dry over Christmas without Internet acess. But who cared - I'd got that spare PSU! The HTML configuration was nice too, everything you wanted was easy and intuitive to find with not too many mouse clicks to get there. the only downside was that 'applying' any change necessitated a full restart. As for reliability, I only remember one one occasion, about half way through the four years or so that I used it, where it froze up needing reboot.
Whatever I end up buying next, the 3Com's going to be a hard act to follow (wiping tear from eye)....
