My old Linksys router kicked the bucket yesterday. It had been “coughing up blood” for a while, randomly dropping connections, but it served me well for the last five years.
So, I strolled into the local discount store to buy another. I’m not using wireless at this point, but I went ahead and got a wireless Belkin router. The world is rapidly moving towards wireless, and I might as well get ready in my house.
Setting up my Linksys wasn’t too difficult for me, after all, I am a professional geek. But it would have been pretty hard on a layman.
It was with that in mind that I plugged in my Belkin CD-ROM. I was very pleasantly surprised at how easy it went.
You see, we nerdy types tend to avoid things like setup wizards. We prefer to just jump in and do things manually. Wizards are generally written for newbies, and we impatiently blast through the baby steps. But the Belkin wizard was different.
First of all, it didn’t load any software on my system. Good on them. I hate installs that load lots of unnecessary junk on my PC, especially when it writes itself to the run at startup part of my registry. Apple’s QuickTime and the Real player are two notorious examples.
But this wizard ran straight from the CD, and it got the job done with minimal fluff. It was able to determine that my ISP needed a username and password and prompted for them when needed. And once it was finished, it wrote everything to the router’s BIOS and then confirmed that the internet was connected and that my wireless connection was safely encrypted via WPA.
The only thing I would like to see improved about the process would have been to make you set a password for the web interface. By default, it’s blank. But connections from the internet are shut off by default, so I guess that’s not the end of the world.
With that, I present today’s FamilyFirst pick: Belkin’s internet home. Having had a good experience with my Belkin router, I recommend you get one for yourself. It’s quite a sophisticated tool for less than forty bucks.
http://www.belkin.com/