Bluddy ADSL Routers!
I had a nice little Netgear ADSL wi-fi router that sat on top of a kitchen cabinet and broadcasted a nice stable 3Mb internet connection all over the house. It needed a fancy directional high gain antenna to reach the far corner, but it was cool. It had a firewall, a DynDNS client and pretty green and orange lights. Then yesterday, shortly after it’s first birthday (no surprise there!), the connection went very slow. Worse than dial-up. I assumed it was just somebody other than me soaking up the bandwidth. Just in case it was a router problem, I rebooted it….. Big mistake! No matter what I did, it refused to believe that I had a broadband enabled line. I dug out the old ADSL modem the ISP gave me when I signed up to figure out if it was the line or the router, and it connected first time, so I had a dud router.
I then thought I’d combine the freebie ADSL modem and an old Linksys access point I had lying around to get up and running until I could get into town to buy a new one next weekend. Leaving something lying around in this house is A Bad Thing. It was dead as a dodo, so I had no choice but to go into Limerick first thing in the morning and buy a new Linksys one in PC World. It’s a shiny silver colour, and has green and red lights, but it violates my one requirement in purchasing replacement hardware. I don’t mind spending the money if what I buy is better than the one it replaces, but this one does exactly the same thing as my old router, in exactly the same way, at exactly the same speed 
An odd thing though. This unit was available in two boxes. I could get it on it’s own for €100 or with a bundled PCMCIA Wi-Fi card, as a “home networking starter kit” for €75!!!!!
It’s got me thinking though….. I’ve got enough parts lying around the place to repair or replace any other PC or PC related part, but for want of a €75 part, I lost two hours this morning that I had to spend going into town and buying the replacement, and an hour or two that I was going to spend working last night. I think I’ll be going on eBay later to find a spare. I also couldn’t go to IMDB.com last night to find out what else I’d seen the girl played Wil Ferrell’s wife in Talladega Nights before…..
By gary | 18. Sep 2006 | Hardware, Internet | No Comments »