Yippee! Thanks to Daco’s good luck charm — the phone number of a real person at UPS– my long-awaited new laptop arrived yesterday at 5:25 p.m. (I had to leave at 5:30). I didn’t even have to call… just the option to do so was enough.
It’s light. It’s fast. It has little niceities like a slot for my camera card, so when I forget the Nikon-specific cable, I don’t have to go buy a new one like I did last Summer. The wireless is internal, so I don’t have to worry about a PCMCIA card sticking out the side, waiting to break off. The USB ports are 2.0, so it won’t take as long to back up as the old one did.
The experience is a decidedly mixed blessing, though: while I ordered it on Friday and received it on Wednesday (good show of agile manufacturing), it isn’t perfect. Before ordering, I called and was heartily assured by a Dell consultant that the Dell 1500 (802.11n) internal wireless card would definitely work with a Belkin pre-n router.
Not.
Also, when I key in my service tag number on the Dell support website (useful for things like bios upgrades, driver updates, and battery recall notices), I get some weird error message about this being a machine sold outside the country.
Funny, the UPS tracking slip shows that it was manufactured in Nashville, and went straight from there to here.
The entire day was spent 1) loading the 16Gb of stuff I can’t live without from the backup of my old system, deleting all the garbage (AOL, Google Desktop, etc.) they ship on it, while bouncing around between a couple of folks at Dell and five at Belkin.
TIP: Linksys has the world’s greatest tech support, and they’re open 24/7. Belkin tech support speaks with a heavy Mexican accent (until you get to level 2, anyway) keeps California banker’s hours, and couldn’t fix it.
I strongly suspect that the Dell 1500 wireless adapter is simply incompatible with the Belkin router, even though both are pre-n. If this is the case, Dell has agreed to send a new card for me to install.
Left with the choices of 1) buy a Belkin 802.11-g USB adapter, or 2) rig something from what I have lying around the house, I chose the cheap option to tide me over. As it turns out, an old Linksys 802.11-b wireless access point cabled into the back of the Belkin provides enough of a signal for me to work on the deck.
That’s all I want… I want to be able to go outside, where I can think.
Only now, I can publish what I think so much faster… which might or might not be a good thing.
Cool. Sounds great but that is why I use an old slow one and still end up with hoof and mouth disease. LOL
I’m suprised you like Belkin. I made the mistake of buying a Belkin 802.11b router a few years ago, and have regretted it since. The firmware is slow as molasses, is not user friendly, and doesn’t work half the time. I’ve run it in DMZ pretty much the whole time I’ve had it because the POS won’t let me poke holes in the firewall.
I’d set it on fire, but then I’d be without a router.
At the time we bought it, Belkin was the only company providing anything with the new pre-n standard… and that’s what Hubby wanted.
There have been little problems along the way, but one of the things I do like about it is that I can use the MAC address filtering in “allow only” mode, which seems to create fewer problems than the various modes of encryption in a mixed environment.
There may be others with that feature now, but it’s what I have, and what I will live with for the time being.