Technology and the joys of gremlins

I finally broke down and decided to get a wireless router for my apartment setup. I perused the Interwebz and found one that got a fairly high rating. It seemed simple enough. It was billed as the sort you just plug in, pick your connection type, create a password to secure your wireless network, and BAM! Internet with wireless.

All the comments I read seemed to support the plug-and-play functionality.

Oh how naive of me to think this was indeed the case.

I forgot about gremlins. No, not Gremlins, but the perverse monsters of World War II legend that mess around with any kind of technology.

Not surprisingly, my wireless router did not work as advertised. I still have the old router and that works like a charm, so it's not the Internet connection. I followed the instructions for the new router to the letter, including the careful, slow, systematic powering up of the modem, followed by the router, followed by the PC itself.

There's still a stubborn refusal to connect. The router itself seems to work just fine but it doesn't appear to want to chat with my modem. I'm finding this somewhat irritating.