It’s almost daily at the moment that something goes wrong.

Today, after my wife accidentely left the Wii on all night, I realised that a lot of the online facilites aren’t working. The two events are unrelated, just simply that after being left on I decided to test it. And I didn’t test all the Wii online functionality when I changed the router recently.

The web appears to work. And that’s about it. If I do a connection check, it says it’s working but then can’t do a system upgrade check. The news won’t work, and I can’t get on the Nintendo Channel (I assume the Shop Channel is the same).

On top of that my SoundBridge¹ refuses to communicate with the router too. Again, something I didn’t test when I changed the router.

In the case of the SoundBridge, it may be a port change that needs to happen.

My laptop can connect to the internet fine too – it seems to me that internet traffic (port 80?) works fine. But then again, my PC² has no issues at all. It’s all very confusing I have to admit.

If anyone out there has any ideas, I’m open to them. Once I register my router with Netgear I’ll submit a query to them about this. I also have active posts on Wii, SoundBridge and Netgear forums (but so far the responses haven’t been too useful).

1. this streams music from a NAS hard drive that I have [↩]
2. which isn’t connected wirelessly, but if the issue is the firewall on the router, it shouldn’t make a difference [↩]

Well, it couldn’t get much worse. I came home to….. a broken wireless modem/router. Noooooo.

It was dead. And a new power supply on it didn’t revive it either.

So I bundled it into a bag and took it to a nearby small computer shop. Thankfully they sold a modem with the same type of power supply so tried that on the modem… dead. They tested my power supply… dead. It was plugged into a surge protected socket and everything else is okay, so we can only assume that one of these (the router or the power supply) took the other one out as well.

Not wanting to be without the internet for too long I bought a replacement there and then. I daren’t look at how much cheaper it would have been buying off of the internet. But, hey, it’s quick and hassle free – if it doesn’t work, it’s easy to take back.

Now, the router I DID have was a Netgear DG834GT, which has Super-G, giving better speed and range with compatible receivers. Such a receiver is in my daughters computer. However, Super-G only works if you’re transmitting on a particular channel – I had to change mine recently because of interference from somebody else on the same channel, so I no longer use the Super-G facility. So faced, at the computer shop, with the Super-G and standard version of this router, I plumped for the later.

I now have a Netgear DG834G – version 4, which includes ADSL2 compatibility.

It was set up REALLY easily – my router name and password is set the same but I’ve put a stronger password on the admin panel. All of this meant that everything wireless around the house burst into life without me having to change anything on them.

Naturally, something went wrong. I took the opportunity, as I was just setting it up, to flash the router firmware to the latest level. It was going through as a strip adapter that I was using (shoddy bit of kit) shorted and tripped the power off. Potentially, the router was knackered already. However, it looks like it had gone through by the time the power went off as the firmware level is correct and it’s all working fine.

One thing I did learn from this…. make a note of my ADSL username and password. I hadn’t and it was buried deep in my Gmails. Thankfully I could use my phone to access and search my mail account. But, now, it’s noted.

These days the popular thing to do is to release software in Beta status, the Beta being more of a status symbol (and to cover your back in case the software doesn’t work) rather than anything.

Unfortunately, it appears to be making companies sloppy. Beta is one thing, but a lot of this software is more alpha quality. In fact, in some cases I’d argue it’s not even that – it’s blatantly not been tested at all before being released.

The latest of these is Apples Safari 3.0.4. Promising lots of improvements, many, many XP users are finding it constantly crashed when being launched. The Apple forums have a “workaround” which many are finding doesn’t work. And I’m one of them.

In fact, I decided to re-install 3.0.3 and found that too crashed. This time, however, the workaround worked and I’m happily working with that version for the time being.

Let’s see how long it takes Apple to fix the issue….

And here’s another. Netgear released a firmware update for a range of its wireless routers on the 3rd November. It worked in so-far as that it stopped most wireless connections from working. So, well tested, eh?

The Netgear forums were a hive of activity, with lots of users having problems. The workaround, as with the Apple issue, was to roll back to a previous release.

Except that today – 16 days later – the same broken firmware is still on their website for download.

Maybe they don’t read their own forums and don’t know about it? Except I reported it a week ago to their technical team and they advised me it “had been passed to the appropriate department”. Hmmm.

And that’s not even masquerading as a beta release!

What’s going on here?