Gentle Readers, if you intend to purchase something from Amazon and look through the products in your target category to find the one you want, for the sake of your sanity always heed the following advice:
When a product is sound, it will have very few, and they’ll concern themselves with marginalia: options the purchaser wish he had, or something about how badly it fits his decor scheme, or the like. When a product is unsound – unreliable or otherwise guaranteed to give you serious trouble – the one-star reviews will be many, and will talk about the worst faults you can imagine.
I write this because I failed to pay attention to the one-star reviews of an expensive product, and I’m paying for it today.
The product is a NETGEAR X4S R7800 Gigabit router with 2.4 GHz and 5.0 GHz wireless support. When I went shopping for said router, it looked to be the best of what’s available in the consumer price range. It had over 3200 reviews against it. More than a hundred of them are one-star reviews.
Yes, I read a few of the one-star reviews. What I didn’t do was note the similarities among them. They should have draped me in red flags:
- Unreliability
- Extremely difficult configuration
- Effectively no support without a purchased support contract.
I should have immediately turned aside. I didn’t.
To make a long story short, NETGEAR managed to disable one of my routers – I have two of them – with a “firmware upgrade.” The thing no longer supports either speed of WiFi. I can’t get the thing to re-enable WiFi – and believe me, I’ve tried.
Being the naive and trusting sort I am, I went to the NETGEAR support site hoping to learn how to undo the damage, or at least, undo the firmware upgrade in the hope of restoring the previous functionality. No dice; not without purchasing a support contract. So I pulled out the meager documentation that went with the router. No dice there, either.
I’ve spent three fruitless hours over this piece of...technology. I’m ready to chew girders and spit rivets. What I think I’m going to do is buy another router, this time at a retail establishment that guarantees both support and refunds. But it most assuredly won’t be a NETGEAR.
It’s not just that the company crippled the product by remote control. It’s not just that the documentation was unhelpful. It’s even that NETGEAR won’t support its product without a purchased support contract. No, there’s even more flavorful icing on this turd.
The router’s listing at Amazon will not accept any more reviews.
The one-star reviews ripped NETGEAR up and down for poor support and service. That strikes me as the most likely reason no more reviews are being accepted. I should have paid more attention. So this plaint is what I’m left with – this and the immediate purchase of another router, so my beloved wife can use her office set-up as she intends.
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