Belkin Ought To Be Sued!

I cannot stress enough how much of a rip off a Belkin brand router is.

The product is a royal piece of you know what.

We bought it for about $45-60 sometime in March/April. It worked for a grand total of 3 months before it crapped out.

We bit the bullet and bought an Airport. I really hoped it would arrive today, but no luck. So, I've spent the day performing the bizarre router re-setting ritual. I think I've reset it at least 6 times. One time I had to reset it after I managed to send one email and get a single webpage to load. I think that connection lasted all of maybe 3 minutes before it failed. The next connection lasted about 45 minutes. I wouldn't be surprised if I had to go perform the ritual again just to get this post to upload when I'm done writing it! I already went through the ritual twice just to get blogger to come up. The first time the ritual failed.

What is this bixarre ritual, you might be wondering? Well, I've got to get up from my comfortable spot in the couch in the cool room (it's 105 outside) to go into the warmest room in the house to unplug the cable modem then wait for about 45 seconds before turning it back on to defeat the mechanism that keeps power on through a momentary interruption. The modem has to really believe it's off, or some such garbage. Then I wait until the ready light comes on and is solid. Then I can plug the festering turd of the Belkin router back in and wait for the little globe light to turn on. Then I can go back to see if the router signal gets to my laptop. About 75% of the time it does. But it ALWAYS loses it at some point - sometimes after a few minutes and other times (rarely) after a few hours.

This has been so frustrating. The arrival of the Airport is hotly anticipated around here - almost as much as all of those people who went out and bought iPhones were about getting their new gadget.

What's funny is that I checked stat counter yesterday for the time in months and found out that already somebody found me by googling info about hooking up Belkin routers to Charter cable. Maybe I was hoping that I managed to get the word out to thousands of people about how awful the Belkin router is. At least that one person hopefully got the message about what they're in for in about 3 months.

Hopefully they didn't buy it from Staples - they won't take the Belkin router back. They also will not accept returns of electronics products unless you buy their "service plan." If you have a problem with something, like a router, printer, computer, etc that you buy at their store, you have to deal with the manufacturer, not them, unless of course, you PAY them to accept a return of a faulty product they are selling. What a scam!

My friend Rich, if he were here, would certainly treat me to his colorful impression of being in this sort of predicament.