Thursday, February 09, 2012

A dying buffalo!

No, not a real buffalo. The wireless on my Buffalo WHR-G125 is slowly dying. About a week ago, I took a chance at ordering a refurbished Linksys E2500. I've had good luck with refurbs in the past and I used to have a Linksys WRT54G prior to the Buffalo, so I thought it would work out fine.

The E2500 only came with the router itself, an ethernet cable, power cord, and installation CD. It didn't come with any manuals at all. I used the CD, but it just got stuck on "downloading updates" for well over half an hour, so I manually went to 192.168.1.1 to set up the router. Thankfully, the manual setup worked.

Unfortunately, the E2500 got very poor signal to the same room compared to my WHR-G125. Even after a firmware upgrade and reset, nothing seemed to help much at all. The only place with excellent signal was in the same room as the router, which defeats the whole purpose of using wireless. So, I sent the E2500 back and in its place, I ordered an Asus RT-N10+.

The RT-N10+ isn't a dual band router, but after using the E2500, I found out that my laptop doesn't support the 5 GHz band anyway, so I have no use for a dual band router since all of my devices are 2.4 GHz.

I haven't received the Asus router yet, but hopefully it'll work a lot better since I'm back to using the Buffalo again until it gets here, which sucks since my wireless connection keeps getting dropped or is extremely slow that I can't do much of anything unless I feel like plugging in and being wired (which still works excellently).