I’m a fickle gamer. I love games, but I don’t have much time to play games, so when I do sit down with a controller I want the game to be great.

For years, I just bought games new from the local Circuit City. Often, though, I’d get a game home and realize I hated it, and I was out $50. When GameFly started, I thought, this’ll be cheaper than buying the games, and I won’t have to worry if I get a game that I hate–I just send it back and get another.

I’ve been a GameFly member for more than three years now (since January of 2004), and overall I’d give it 3/5 stars. It does work as advertise–they mail me games, and I send them back postage-free in the included mailer. They’ve always given me whatever game I had at the top of my queue, including games that would have been hard to buy in stores. They sell used games at very cheap prices ($20-$35) for the few occasions that I want to buy one.

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I’ve used Vonage for voice since August, 2004. Voice was okay; it was never great. There was always some delay/latency. Sometimes it wasn’t really noticeable, and other times it was very distracting–it seemed like a whole second between the time you spoke and the time the other person heard you speak. You’d be surprised how awkward that makes conversation, because you’ll often be inadvertently interrupting the person you’re speaking to, and you won’t realize it for a second.

I decided that I needed some Quality of Service (QoS) so I replaced my router with one of these D-Link GamerLounge routers. That series of routers has a much more aggressive QoS than other routers, because it will constantly break large, lower-priority packets into smaller segments. See, while QoS will prioritize realtime traffic like Voice over IP (VoIP) over traffic like Web transfers (say, HTTP and FTP), it can only prioritize queued traffic. That helps, but if the router is in the middle of transferring a large packet, it can’t be interrupted with a VoIP packet, and the VoIP packet has to wait the few milliseconds it takes to transmit the large, lower-priority packet. The GamerLounge routers minimize this effect by fragmenting all large, low-priority outbound packets so that the interruption will be less.

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