Oy vey, routers and comms

After my purchase of the Belkin router I’ve had nothing but trouble. I never could get it to talk to the printer, so I decided to buy a USB cable that would stretch between the printer and the router or, if that didn’t work, the printer and the computer. I don’t do a whole lot of printing anyway, and wireless printing is something I can do without.

Then I thought it was time to download the Brother printer drivers for Windows 10, and that threw more spanners into the works. To top that off, the router dropped connections frequently, and when trying to establish a connection I’d get a “Network protocols missing from this computer” alarm. I got ticked off and turned the whole thing off overnight.

This morning I tried again and it was still unable to establish a network connection. I remembered that the router has a reset button, so I tried pushing that. Lo and behold, connection established. On to the printer again.

After about three hours of futzing around, the router failed again, and this time the reset button didn’t fix it. I gave up. I decided the damned router might or might not be the principal problem, but it wasn’t for me. So I disconnected all the cables, packaged it all back up, found the receipt and went back to Best Buy. Fortunately they gave me no argument; I’d have been willing to pay a reshelving fee if I had to, but I didn’t.

I tried plugging the old Netgear router back in and, for a wonder, it connected. The printer still doesn’t work properly, but I’ve got time to figure that out.

Man. I’m too old for this to be fun anymore.

4 Comments

  1. My router knocks me off FB all the time. I usually reboot the router or just wait it out – generally it comes back to life in 3 – 5 minutes.

  2. Well, it’s five years old, so I just assumed it was trying to die.

    The guy at Best Buy said all these “N” routers are probably going to be obsolete by the end of the year.

  3. I used to sneer at the guys in the software retail stores, muttering that they’d all been selling shoes (an honorable profession! Look at Al Bundy!) just weeks before.

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