I read the other reviews on Amazon before purchasing this product. I saw some were good and some were bad. I thought, well, people have different opinions and I may like it. No. There are too many mistakes. Others have commented on VLAN issues with the 2950's. I had the same problem. Any more than 3 vlans and it just wouldn't work. It was very frustrating in that I wasted ALOT of time thinking it my configs at first. Then there is some kind of bug with pings. When you ping from one specific PC to another across your virtual network the entire application shuts down. This will consistently happen so you must remember which PC's you can and can't ping to and from safely and make sure to save everything before every ping. You will put in configurations then 5 minutes later do a "sh run" and they will mysteriously be gone. Or take a network statement out from under OSPF but it just will NOT remove it. Lastly there is the user friendly-ness. I rate this as a zero. It is the most cumbersome application I have ever used. It would have helped had I been able to open the user guide but that did nothing when I clicked on it. I lost many a network because I didn't save the topologies and configs correctly. So I called Boson for help. You have to leave your name and number and they will call back within 48 hours. That was 2 weeks ago. I have not heard from them.

I sent the company some feedback last week and have heard nothing from them. Product does not apply ACL's properly to interfaces and has problems recording matches to outbound ACL's. Also there are problems with alternate vlans on 2950 switches. Numerous bugs running verion 5.07 with latest patch. Was a very disappointing purchase.

Dennis Byford, CCNP

it is obvious that Amazon stopped checking who writes the reviews for the products.

The Boson cr!@P that comes with this book is the worst software I have ever seen.

Obviously, each Boson employee wrote a review for their own product as there is no one I have met, (and I go to a large Cisco Academy in San Jose, Ca,) thinks this is worth $0.02, let along the ENOURMOUS price they are charging for this!!

OK, besides the terrible software, let's get to the error prone book and extrememly boring material that is "included" in this kit meant to just rip people off because of the name "cisco".

I am not alone in my thoughts here, as I mentioned. The Cisco users group here in San Jose, as well as the Cisco Academy, each with hundreds of memebers use the Todd Lammle Sybex book and the RouterSim software.

I have returned ALL of my cisco press junk to Amazon asap. It was SUCH a hassle. Do not get caught up in this fake marketing of this terrible product.

At least I have some respect for the writer of the book, but not much, and I have absoultely NO resepect for the Boson products and people...

Several reviews of this product have complained about the EULA. Boson has been very helpful in allowing users to register this software on more than one personal use computer. So if you have a work computer, home computer, and laptop, you should have no problem registering it on these multiple machines.

I bought and used this product to prepare for my CCNA exam, and found it to be a wonderful investment (I passed with a 933 on my first try). I did most of the labs and created some of my own. I used this simulator while reading through the Cisco Press Certification library, testing myself in areas as I read. I had no problems installing the product and have had no problems running it. My only "gripe" is that it doesn't support as many features as I would like (for example etherchannel configuration). But for these features I will have to wait for Netsim for CCNP, still in beta. But I thought it was a very life-like product. For example, I learned to get up and get a drink of water or something while waiting for RIP or IGRP to converge, and I got to see OSPF and EIGRP converge very quickly. Overall, this product will prepare you and give you confidence for the simulator sections of the exams, and if used properly, the troubleshooting sections where you may need to be able to read output of a "show" or "debug" command and figure out what is going on.