Router Drama

I've talked about my router issues before. Well, inbetween Jan 2007 and today (specifically last summer) the antenna on our wireless network card on the computer broke off (long story) and I had to run a cable from the upstairs office to the downstairs red room where the internet modem resided.

Well, Kim hated the junkie look of the long black ethernet cable running through the house and demanded I fix it. I finally got a new antenna from my sister and this past Friday I decided to get the wireless connection back up and running. The new antenna worked fine and the computer could talk to the router with nary a trouble but the router and the internet refused to play nice together. Sometimes it would connect and be fine and then WHAM no connection. Or rather, no web browsing even though the connection said it was up and running. I was worried that all my messing with the router in previous attempts to solve my issues had screwed it up beyond my ability to recover.

I've never been very happy with the D-Link router so I went to Walmart Sunday morning and looked to see what else was available. Just my luck, a Linksys wireless router was on sale and I picked it up and brought it home. Surely this would be easier and more dependable I thought.

Everything seemed to be going fine with the installation until it came time to connect to the internet and I hit an error. Damn! Several attempts yet nothing would work. I reconnected my cable and decided to check if the password to connect to Bell; yep, got that wrong the first time. Ok back to the router... what? I can't connect!? What the hell!?

Reboot, reset, try again. Nope. DAMN! Why can't my computer even talk to the router now? Half and hour later I realize that I set the router to not use DHCP when I was messing around and hence my computer could not get an IP address from the router. I hard coded its IP address so I could connect to the router (worked), enabled DHCP, set my computer back to using DHCP, and then entered the correct internet conneciton information. POOF! Everything worked.

So... anyone want to but a D-Link wireless router?