Wednesday night was like any other night; the boyfriend was playing WoW and I was fiddling around on my laptop (yes, we are geeks and don't get out much. Can you tell?). Our four-year-old router had never had any problems with this in the past, but on that fateful Wednesday, at approximately 8pm, the boyfriend complained that he was getting some severe lag and was eventually disconnected from his server. I found I had also been disconnected from the internet and on looking at the router, its lights were all switched off.
Odd, it was acting like the power had been switched off, which wasn't the case. No amount of switching plugs/sockets/anything would have it come back on. A friend poked it and managed to get it to come back to life, telling me it looked like a fuse had gone inside it. Alas, while the lights were on, no one was home - dear old router would not connect to the internet but seemed ok acting as a switch between computers. By this time, I'd dug out our 7-year-old BT modem with one port on it which enabled us to get back online... one at a time. And don't even think about using the USB attachment with anything other than Windows XP (which we don't have) - I had almost forgotten what the Blue Screen Of Death looked like but I've built up enough reserves of it while trying to use that thing to last me a while. My genius idea of using the dead router as a switch with the BT modem somewhat worked... As long as I was ok being tethered to said router (er, no) and that again, only one person wanted to use the net at once. Conclusion: switch also dead.
What with various emergency trips to France (my grandmother is not well :( ), funds are not exactly great at present so today it was off to the local overpriced PC shop to get whatever was cheapest. Came back with an almost identical model to the last one, but this one seems to have two aerials, better speeds and has some super duper secure something-or-other setting. The advantage of it being pretty much the same meant that I could restore a backup of the settings on the old router and get up and running in minutes without the need to redo all the security and setting up new passwords on all our wireless devices (ick).
Phew. RIP, Netgear DG834GT. You served us well.
In other news, I have rejoined The Q*Bee after (almost) 2 years. W00t! Come trade with me! :D
Oh, and Lucy recovered fine from her surgery :) The cone came off a couple of days after the last entry and we had no problems since. She's been bouncy ever since :D
