The Belkin Home Base is a small home server designed to help your isolated peripherals speak to more than one laptop at a time. With built-in Wi-Fi and fixed Ethernet, it a comprehensive all-in-one solution but does it work? Well read our Belkin Home Base review and find out for yourself.

If you own a printer then it’s more likely than not to be connected to a sole PC or laptop using USB. This means sharing it with other devices can be problematic. The Belkin Home Base service is a neat device that allows you to wirelessly connect your home printer to the laptops and other Wi-Fi-enabled devices in your home.

It consists of a built-in 802.11n Wi-Fi connection as well as a standard Ethernet port, so you can easily hook it up to your home network or have it next to your printer, anywhere in the house. The Home Base comes with an installation CD-ROM that needs to be installed on your main laptop, which allows the units own fixed IP address.

When it comes to sharing the Belkin Home Base with other devices you’ll need to install the Belkin Control Centre on each laptop before it will recognise its presence. It’s based around a simple web browser interface that is simple to manage, so monitoring what is happening on your home network is easy. What we really like about this interface is that it also allows you to manage any USB storage added to your network by setting and monitoring access rights.

When it comes to using the Home Base we found that it worked exceedingly well in close range, with HD video running from an attached external hard drive to the laptop. Data speeds tend to drop once walls are introduced by even from a floor away we were able to send work to the printer.

Verdict
With a price of £150 (inc. VAT), the Belkin Home Base isn’t cheap but it’s a great addition to any busy household that needs frequent access to a printer or scanner. That you can easily add external storage too makes it ideal for sharing files around the home, which we think is the deal clincher with this home server.