When we got the new laptop last year, the built in wireless card wouldn’t work with my wireless router. It was a sad thing, but I got a new router out of the deal. As some of you may have noticed, this site (and others hosted by me) were down a lot more than I’d have liked over the past month or two. The reason was directly related to the crappy router that I bought. I had finally gotten fed up with the constant connection problems, and decided to replace it, but before I did that, I thought I’d look to see if there was an answer to the problems in the Netgear support forums. Lo and behold, new firmware, supposed to address all the problems that I was having.

So, fastforward to Saturday, the new firmware is out, and I decide to do the upgrade. Small problem, the firmware upgrade completely trashed the router. It was routing packets on the LAN, but the admin interface wasn’t available, wireless was a no-go, and there was no LAN connectivity either. If anyone tried to access this site on Saturday, they likely know what I’m talking about.

So, I ran out to FutureShop and picked up a replacement. While I was there, I scared several people off of buying the piece of crap Netgear router that I was replacing too. The new router seems to be working fine, and the config interface is slightly nicer (even though it took some time to get used to)

Pretty frustrating. I’m not sure if I’m going to send the busted router in to Netgear so they can fix it or not. It’s not like I could wait the three months that it would take to get repaired - especially with Julia’s website drawing in the people like crazy. Given how unreliable it was, I’m not sure it’s worth the postage.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “If I break, buy a new one!” - Krusty Doll.