07 September, 2010

Unhelpful Help

I bought a new router yesterday as my old one is a couple iterations of 802.11 specs behind and seemed ready to give up the ghost. The Cisco Connect software makes it sound like all you have to do is run it and go. Well, that didn't happen.

First I get an error that I have no Internet connectivity:





I clicked help because of a warning saying essentially, "If you try to manually configure things, you'll ruin everything!" and what do I get?





So, if you can't get onto the Internet, then go on the Net for help. That's just swell. Fortunately I am an IT geek so it took me 2 seconds to figure out the problem and go into the router settings to correct it. But I can imagine your average user being totally flummoxed here. Why not direct people to the PDF documentation provided on the installation CD?

Anyway, the new router is working just swell. Streaming Netflix via our Wii should be a much better experience now.

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