Issues With Belkin Router/Modem Any Ideas For A Newbie?

[davsl]

After looking on here it would appear that a lot of people think that Belkin are rubbish, maybe I should of looked on here before I bought one, but I have a feeling that my issues are casued by my lack of experience Basically I have just purchased a laptop and already have a desktop PC, I was using a USB modem and zonealarm and this was obviously pretty hassle free for a noob like myself. But now with the laptop I wanted to setup a wireless network with my desktop PC wired to the router via an ethernet cable and the laptop running wirelessly. First of all I have no issues with the wireless side of it as I have this working fine. My problem is that sometimes the modem will drop it's connection, I seem to have made this quite a bit better by changing the MTU setting from it's default value (think it was 1440 or something) to 1400, I read about this on the net about my ISP. Everything else is setup as listed by my ISP, PPOA, and VPI and VCI settings, VC MUX setting etc, everything else is set in auto determined by the ISP. As I say this is working ok, although I may try phoning Belkin's support to see if they can offer any other advice.

The other issue that I have is when using Bit Tornado this router is useless, even when I turn the firewall off totally, Bit Tornado is working really slowly and the yellow indicator is on which states that a firewall is blocking it. I have tried turning the firewall on and setting up ports for it as stated on portforward.com's setup guide for my router. This still changes nothing!

I find this a real pain, but it is probably my inexperience but it seems like lots of grief. At the moment I am tempted to just use my old USB modem for Bit Tornado when I go to bed as this seems like more hassle than it is worth.

One other thing that I have noticed is that the little network icon (2 small PC screens) has vanished from the taskbar. However the router is working fine, is this normal? And any tips on how to get it back, if it is supposed to be there (used to be)? Usually any issues with Windows result in a full format for me as I am not to clued up. But this is failry minor. Any help please