Proving that filesharing is bad, kids, my wireless ADSL router melted after a 12 hour bittorrent download, leaving only some untwinkling lights and a worrying burnt electric smell. Luckily, the Apple Centre agreed to look for my receipt (I could only find the iPod receipt to prove I was a valued customer) rather than chasing me away in disgrace. Apparently, though the receipts are printed out, they aren't put into a DB, so someone at head office had to go through all the sales in the period I got the ADSL line installed, which was nice of them.
Annoyingly, they couldn't provide a replacement immediately (bought more than 6 months ago), nor could they loan me even an old crappy one, sell me one on the basis that I'd nudge nudge wink wink take it back when I got the replacement, or rent one to me. This sucks. They did suggest though, that places like PC World might have cheaper ones for 30 quid or so.
This wasn't the case. Their wireless ones cost 70+, and the cheap wired only one was 45 (but was out of stock). Eventually I came across a Zoom ADSL modem for 25 quid, it's not a router, it just plugs into USB port of a Windows or Mac machine but anything to get a connection.
I tried briefly to get it to work with Linux, then gave up and commandeered gf's iBook, which at least lets me work though it's yet another set of keyboard mappings to get used to. (Alt+3 for #, Fn-Down for PgDown except in terminal where that scrolls the buffer and you have to do Shift-Fn-Down).
Netgear customer support is rather unimpressive, an Indian call center, but with attitude. Various people called them while I was away pretending to be me, or my wife apparently, with one call securing a "Yes we'll send a replacement" but then a 20 minute hold and cut-off, and another having the tech support guy berating my girlfriend for not having the serial number to hand.
I called and after 20 minutes of faffing and repeating technical details and spellings of names agreed that they would email me some freepost labels within 24 hours. They didn't do this because they'd spelt my email address wrong, promised to fix it, put me on hold, cut me off, didn't change the address, and are now posting me the freepost labels via "normal post".
Re:internet sharing!
osfameron on 2005-12-16T10:05:29
Aha! I got as far as creating a network from the wireless icon in the taskbar, which my Ubuntu laptop couldn't get an IP address from, will try this later, thanks!
