Buying Routers
Choosing a wireless router for home networking can be quite a task. If you had buy a car and had to choose between a WagonR and a Benz, and you’re on a tight budget then the decision to be made can be quite simple and obvious! But choosing wireless routers isn’t that simple because almost every company prices it’s router at the same price as the competition does. And since I always think about quality first; price second, most vendors at Nehru Place find it quite frustrating while trying handle my dozens of questions. It’s not that I try to make fun of them, I only expect them to know as much(the bare minimal) as the GeekSquad does.

Even with so many shops and so many different people to consult, I find that I get no help because the person either thinks he is too big for his boots or he thinks that he’d better not show me his foolishness. After long discussions, I ended up buying the Netgear WGR614 which is the cheapest G-Wireless LAN Compliant Router Netgear manufactures. There is one thing I’ve learnt being an Indian in India. You’ve got to buy sasta-kam-tikao(cheap but enough to get your work done) stuff because of the dust-heat-humidity problem which causes most household appliances to last only 1 month more than their respective warranties. So I didn’t have much of an option but to go for this one as it was the most popular one in the market and also close to the smallest too.

Setting up routers
I have setup 3 routers successfully and surprisingly all three didn’t work when I used the manual bundled with their packages. Instead, when I plugged in the Ethernet cable from the ISPs’ Routers into the ethernet socket of the different routers, I saw Bon Echo welcoming me instantly.

Setting up routers is easy but only if you know what you’re doing. If you don’t, like I didn’t the first time I tried setting up one(failed 4 times, succeeded the 5th time), then you’ll feel like returning the router you’ve just purchased for a new one that isn’t so buggy. But me being the way I am, I Googled and Googled till I found an answer in one link on some wierd forum on some 20th page of Google’s search results. Google’s search snippets are so cool, that I never had to click on any link in the first 19 pages of search results as I know what I’m reading.

I haven’t yet done too much of research on how these routers work, but since I know all of them work fine when I plug the internet cable into their ethernet ports instead of the internet ports, am happy I made this discovery which I am sharing with you. Most probably, it is something that a million others have already blogged about, but I need to have this on record.

NDTV doesn’t know shit about Wireless Routers
When the NDTV guys gave an explanation on their Gadget Guru Show about how to setup Wireless Routers they were actually reading the introductory paragraph you’d see on any routers product manual. This way people will obviously get false impressions since these introductions are meant to make you feel you’ve made the right choice and nothing more. It is in the following pages that you see how dumb you were to think it is as easy as the NDTV guys had said.

Moral of the story:
If you ever need advice about hardware, installation, etc. you’ll have to use Google like I do. It gives you precise results, and since it is not human-controlled it leaves out all the content that isn’t important.

The science of buying a router would still be unclear to me, if I were to buy another one tomorrow. But this is something that wouldn’t make me as nervous as my Chemistry unit test in two weeks will. Plus, we’ve got places like CNET.com to give us moral support when we go gadget-shopping.