M$ Routers Suck
Off to the continent yesterday, picking up a router and optical mouse along with groceries too expensive or unavailable at our island general store. The new mouse is great, after a few years the ball on the old one just gets to a point where it’s never totally clean and always sticks at some point, a real pain when your picking up some code from one place to another and you don’t get exactly what you were aiming for.
In kind of a hurry to catch the ferry back, I picked up a Linksys router and then the salesman at Future Shop shows me this other router with a wireless access point built in for only $10 more. It’s a Microsoft product so I’m a little wary but the box says it does NAT and the latest wireless standard so I get it. Big mistake. First thing it wants to do is install software that has to phone home to a M$ server every 15 minutes to get an update, and after installation it won’t run unless talking to another M$ server out there somewhere first. There’s no place to do port forwarding or any of the other functions you would expect from a router, just a piece of M$ crap really with CE running in it. There’s also no need for them to know when I decide to use their equipment, I paid for it and when I connect to the Internet is my own business thank you very much.
Back to the continent today, grrr.