I can't stand it when I'm trying to find an answer to a tech question and the only resource I have is forums. Why? The people who start the threads rarely know a thing about what they're trying to do and they have their terminology completely off so a search on something relevant to your problem pulls up millions of irrelevant forums topics.
Example: I have a Belkin 54 G (FSD7230-4) router that I use for my wireless connection at my house. I recently set up our old desktop pc in my room and have it connected to my external hard drive so I can listen to all of my music on there. Problem is the PC doesn't have a wireless PCI card. But I happen to have a Linksys BEFW11S4 wireless B router that still works. I thought hey wouldn't it be great if I could just set that up as a Client AP and setup my Belkin to send a wireless bridge signal to it and therefore get my WAN connection on the PC in my room from that bridge link. So I set about setting it up and trying to figure it all out. I've gotten into the settings for the linksys and been able to try all kinds of customizations. I also tried messing with the Belkin and the only thing I've succeeded at so far is completely screwing up my network twice. So I've actually had to reconfigure my network twice so that I can just get my internet access back again.
I've been searching and searching for somewhere that would say how to set something like this up. Something to tell me just what settings I need to set up on the linksys including what IP address and gateway to use as well as any other settings such as the IP for the PC and stuff. There is a guide on how to configure the bridge in the Belkin which is really easy. But I haven't been able to find anything on setting up the Linksys that way. I have found a couple of forums on the topic but they all deal with using a Linksys 54 G with some special third party firmware that I can't use on either of the routers I have. The terminology and skill of most of these thread starters is insane. I am wondering what most of these people are doing trying to set these things up in the first place. One guy in particular kept calling his wireless router a "bridge mode AP" even though the router he had wouldn't do bridge mode and he didn't know how to find out the IP address of his computer or to a trace route from the command line. Another guy kept talking about B-mode and G-mode for wireless APs. There's no such thing as B-mode and G-mode. These are standards my friend not modes. There was one that I could have answered easily had I been around to read it when the guy first started but there were about 5 pages of debate as to whether or not the linksys B router supports WPA or not. Simple, it does not.
Then you have the responders who instead of trying to find a simple solution to the problem want you to change all of your network settings and do a hard reset on your device and then do a little rain dance. Either that or you get the people who have nothing more useful to contribute other than "your device sucks buy a new one" or something similar. The non-simple replies usually tend to give very little assistance as far as helping you figure out just what they want you to do either. They give a huge list of instructions that assume you know exactly what program you are supposed to be using or what config or batch code you are editing.
I am very frustrated. I also hate when you type support or setup or troubleshoot into the search but you still get price comparisons and reviews in the results. The only things I've found that even talk about what I want to do don't at all explain how to do it. They just show a pretty diagram and say "look you can do this with it!" I'd like to tell them what else they can do with it...
P.S. HP has probably the worst support website in the world.
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