Firmware
I almost bought a new wireless router yesterday. I say almost because what I actually did was walk into the evil that is PC World, see the silly prices they were charging for them, and walk back out again. Today I decided to check whether or not new firmware was available on the Netgear website and despite me being pretty sure I had done this before, there was. I downloaded it and ran through the installation instructions, which are essentially just uploading the file to the router via the web interface and then waiting for it to reboot. So I did that and waited. And waited. And waited. And after 15 minutes of waiting I switched the router off, and with almost no hint of surprise, it didn’t come back on again afterwards.
I started this process because my wireless connection kept dropping off all the time, so I suppose now that it didn’t work at all I’d kinda solved that problem. There was no way it was going to come and go now.
At this stage I almost just got in the car and drove to PC World to buy a new one, but first I went through all my cupboards to find my spare ADSL router so I could get onto the Netgear website again and download the fix tool. Unfortunately despite going through every box I could find, it was nowhere to be seen. I did find a universal remote though, that might come in handy later. Anyway, after a lot of scrabbling around I remembered I had my Nokia, and it had a web-browser, perhaps I could get on the Netgear website using it, download the tool and transfer it to my PC so I could run it.
Nope.
I could get online and to the Netgear website, but it just wouldn’t download it. I’d click and click and click that link, but it didn’t even start the transfer. But I wasn’t foiled yet, the E61 has bluetooth, my Mac has bluetooth… maybe something here could work. After screwing around for a bit I managed to get my Mac to dial up to a Pipex account via the E61, a Pipex dial-up account our office used almost 9 years ago that not only still works, but which I could still remember the details for. So I got onto the Netgear website and managed to download the fix, which thankfully was only around 600k, because I was doing it at 1k per second.
So then I transferred it from my Mac to the laptop and plugged the laptop directly in the router and ran it. And you know what, it still didn’t work. It just errored, some strange error about the network card. So I copied it onto my main PC, crawled around on the floor some more and ran a cable directly from it to the router. This time I was more successful and the router sprang back to life again, complete with the latest firmware.
By this point I was tired and annoyed, but that may just have been withdrawal symptoms from having no net connection for almost three hours, rather than all the crawling around.
Oh and if you’re wondering, I haven’t lost signal since.
