Setup

Setting up the NETGEAR Powerline kit is quick and easy. All you have to do is drop the CD-ROM into your system and click 'install utility'.

Here we see something very nice. The installer is looking for updates before it runs. This ensures that you are going to get the most current software possible. Nice touch NETGEAR.

After that the installer is pretty simple to get through. Once the setup utility is installed you can get to work on connecting your Powerline network. Unfortunately there is a tiny little problem. On Windows 7 x64 the utility did not work at all, while on our Windows 2003 R2 VM things ran fine. This is not a failure of NETGEAR, but of the Powerline people. They have not updated the software to run on a 64-bit OS since they released it.

After we managed to get things working from the Windows 2003 server, it was a simple matter of putting in the passwords (remember, I told you to write them down…) and we have a good connection.

The utility does more than just establish a connection, though. You can setup security (through encryption) QoS, run diagnostics and even reset your devices if needed.

There is one nice side to having the same old software running the Powerline setup. As you can see in the first screen shot, more than two units showed up. This is because we also had additional models from TRENDNet and AirLive plugged in. These showed up under the same utility, allowing for easy one-stop control of all of your Powerline adapters.