Flush from the success of Windows is shit and O2 are shit, I thought I should tell you Belkin are shit.

My dad bought a Linksys WAG54g wireless ADSL modem and router like mine, so my mother can use the Internet downstairs again now that I’ve left with all my network equipment. I set it all up, secured it and wrote out detailed instructions on how it works, what the terminology means, what the settings do etc and went home only to get a call later that evening saying she couldn’t get on the net. So I half mumbled some stuff down the phone and left them to get on with it, only to find out a few days later that they hadn’t got it to work, so the next weekend I went down to set it up again. It had occured to me that maybe it was configured per user on the Windows machine so I set about setting it up for each user. Strangely however, it seemed that the settings were correct, but just not enabled or something, so I did various checks and applies and reboots etc, only for the thing to continue to work as my user and not for anyone else. The ‘Enable radio’ button wouldn’t enable radio.

Then after getting pissed off I realised that I was an admin and everybody else was a normal user, so I bumped my mother’s user up to admin and tried again – it worked. Cool. Only I’d set everyone up as a normal user for a reason to stop them changing anything they don’t understand, my niece particularly, being 6, likes to whizz the mouse around while clicking the mouse furiously, which often leads to scrambled icons, opened programs and destroyed settings. So I decided to get the latest drivers for the wireless card, obviously you shouldn’t need to be an administrator to use a network card. Oh fucking yes you do. If you use Belkin cards you do. To be honest, I’ve always been the admin of every machine I’ve used, so maybe that’s common to many cards and drivers and I’ve never noticed, but what a fucking stupid idea. The whole point of levels of user authority is to prevent people who don’t know what they’re doing from things they shouldn’t be doing. There were no driver updates, so I had to set every user to be an administrator to get on the net. That’s shit. Sure I could have faffed around in the registry or something looking for the magic key to let normal users use the device, but I’m not going to spend an hour on Google looking for shit about Windows.

Man alive, Belkin are shit. Allegedly.

(As a side note for the lawyers out there, I’m happy to tell the world that Belkin are great and listen to their customers if you get your programmers to fix this ridiculous situation).