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!

Re: Linksys bites again

There are 15 messages in this thread, displayed in the order they were posted.

Keith 5/22/2006 9:20:25 AM Pacific

You'd think that a company like Cisco would be able to put together a reliable router. THAT'S THEIR WHOLE FRIGGIN' BUSINESS.

Jerry Kindall

5/23/2006 12:31:18 PM Pacific

I cannot disagree one bit.
I really don't understand why some of these companies are still in business. Netgear used to make good stuff but I had to return one of theirs last year because it just stopped working when too many connections were opened. I just can't believe that D-Link turned out to be the best I could find, they used to be awful.

Gordon Hawley

5/24/2006 2:11:42 PM Pacific

It seems quality has really gone downhill nowadays for many companies. Even Apple products are not as good quality wise as they were in the past. Could it be due to the fact that most products are now made in China?

Jerry Kindall

6/8/2006 8:46:28 AM Pacific

Being made in China wouldn't explain the poor functionality of Linksys' products, which strikes me as an issue of design or engineering rather than one of manufacturing (not that I checked to see where they are made).

B. Jenkins

6/27/2006 12:13:55 AM Pacific

Wow, seems like you have had some major issues with Linksys. Just like a majority of your viewers I to will watch out when I even think about purchasing a Linksys router. What router would you recommend for a home network with internet access?

Jerry Kindall

6/27/2006 8:14:14 AM Pacific

Right now I'm recommending D-Link and Buffalo.

Jerry Kindall

6/27/2006 4:08:56 PM Pacific

A quite good deal on the D-Link DGL-4300 here in fact. That's the router I have.

Craig Baetz

6/28/2006 1:19:54 PM Pacific

Hi Jerry,
What happened to if it is not borken..... You had it working...

Jerry Kindall

6/28/2006 1:23:28 PM Pacific

The problem was that the firmware upgrade locked it up good and tight. As far as I know there wasn't any problem with the hardware itself, it just couldn't do anything after the firmware upgrade. This points not to hardware assembly quality but to the software engineers. I don't think Linksys outsources their programming to China... yet.

B. Jenkins

7/10/2006 5:42:11 AM Pacific

Thank you very much!

B. Jenkins

7/10/2006 6:00:52 AM Pacific

Question: With this D-Link router do I need a "D-Link" card to get the full 108Mbps transfer rate or will a normal internal wireless a/b/g laptop network card work?

Jerry Kindall

7/10/2006 8:31:43 AM Pacific

Depends on which chipset your network card uses. My laptop has an Atheros chipset that works at 108Mbps, so does the Buffalo ethernet converter I have.

Dave Howard Schiff

10/4/2006 6:10:16 PM Pacific

Dear Jerry,
So far i'm using 5 RV042 with VPN tunnels and so on, and I never had a problem including on setting QoS. The software running with Oracle 9i is working great since I managed to setup the email to be low priority and the Oracle to high priority. Really bites me all the trouble you had O.o

Reaper

2/20/2007 4:49:22 AM Pacific

The only linksys to buy at the moment is WRT54GL. Install 3rd party sftware like dd-wrt and its full of features!

Franko

2/26/2007 9:15:27 AM Pacific

Very convenient size and $20 price after staples rebate.
Upgraded, flashed to 1.045 European UK fimware, works well.
WRT54GC-EU_FW1045.zip
The firmware file size is only 600 K, so there is hope for more options,
in the future, from hackers ?
Cisco neutered the low price Linksys router's feature so as not to compete with main top end cisco routers ? Buy or destroy the competition, just like M$

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Re: Linksys bites again