Saturday was long. I drove to a site 150 miles (241 km) away to install a wireless LAN, stopping mid-way to visit one of my favorite computer shops to pick up a couple of wireless routers. "These have detachable antennae, right?" I asked.
"Oh yes"; I was assured. I arrived on site and unpacked the first router only to find that it had fake antennae (plastic moulded to look like an antenna, with ordinary hookup wire visible at the hinge). Needless to say I'm disgusted at Linksys for producing something so awful. Presumably they get away with this because a lot of people buying wireless routers don't know any better. I was also kicking myself for not having torn the boxes open there in the shop to inspect the goods.
I drove to the next city in search of a replacement and found a disposeable Netgear wireless router. Both of the people who read my blog probably already know that I swore off Netgear routers some years ago when I went though about five firmware revisions in the course of a week, each being slightly worse than the previous one. This on a router that we bought to replace a Netgear router that had broken firmware. :-( spot the recurrent theme). Saturday's Netgear router lived up to its badge and refused to work. "It should be working..." said the nice man from Netgear. I think that was his obvious statement for the day. After another round trip to the next city to get a refund on the broken Netgear, I found a Belkin wireless router at the last place I could think of looking. Hopefully that one will work long enough for me to wrap my head around smesh (or something similar) and find credible wireless routers to replace the solitary Belkin.
4 comments:
Linksys has been a bit... different... since being bought by Cisco. I still swear by them, though, only if because the competition still sucks.
Having once owned a Linksys router, I would never do so again. My current router (a Cable and Wireless job) does almost nothing except work, in both of which particulars it differs from the Linksys I had...
I have a older Linksys wireless 801.11b router that I thought was shoddy, but I think it was Comcast's infamous DNS server issues after all.
I swear by D-Link. Their product are not fancy nor do they have tons of features, however they do what they are supposed to do. I have never had an issue with my D-Link wireless router, NICs, or wireless adapters. You plug them in and they work. Admittedly, networking is probably my weakest area so I don't ask for much. Having said that, I have tried Lynksys, netgear, and motorola network devices and have had nothing but problems from all of them.
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