Saturday 05/20/06
You'd think I would have learned from my experience last year not to buy any more Linksys products, but recently their WRT45GC has been going for under $20 at various retailers, including Office Depot and Fry's, and it looked like a decent, if basic, compact router of the sort I wished I'd had in my bag when I was in San Francisco for Macworld. And I'd been wanting a router to leave at my parents' house next Christmas, too... so I picked up two. I figured I'd pick up one or two more, too, if these worked out all right; the last cheapo wireless routers I bought, the AirLink 101s from Fry's, had some problems doling out DHCP reliably, and I have a friend or two who could stand to have that issue fixed.
So it was with much anticipation that I plugged in the WRT54GC. And indeed, it worked fine, and all the features you'd need seemed to be there. I figured it would be tough for even Linksys to screw up a product category that they'd been building for the past decade or so.
Then I noticed that the router had firmware v1.02.5 installed and wondered if it was the newest. It wasn't, so I downloaded and installed v1.02.8. And the router stopped working immediately.
And then, of course, I upgraded the firmware in my second WRT54GC because I was suffering a bout of intuition, and naturally exactly the same thing happened again. Within twenty minutes I had converted two brand-new Linksys products into bricks merely by installing Linksys-provided firmware using the Linksys-provided instructions. Absolutely stunning.
I'm off to return these, buy a bunch more, turn them all into bricks with new firmware, return those, and continue until all the Linksys WRT54GC routers for sale in the Seattle metro area are non-functional. Bwahahahahahaha!
