Router with a Mind of Its Own

When I got back from Florida, I disconnected the desktop computer in the basement because it had a Windows XP operating system.  Microsoft was no longer supporting Windows XP.  I had read that there were hackers waiting to attack the XP computers.

The old XP computer had a printer hooked to it that the other computers in the house could access through the home network.  So I decided to buy a new router with a USB port to hook up the printer to the router.  Then we wouldn’t have to bring our computers downstairs and hook them up to the printer directly if we wanted to print something.

I plugged the printer into the new router.  I made sure all of the computers in the house could access the printer.  I thought everything was good.  So I stacked the printer with paper before I went to bed.  The next morning while I was sleeping, Barb decided to use the printer.  She wanted to print one page.  When she went downstairs to get her page, the printer was printing the page over and over again.  She turned off the printer and turned it back on. It started printing the page again.  So she took all the paper out of the printer and it stopped because it ran out of paper.

When I got up, the first thing I had to do was figure out why the printer wouldn’t stop printing.  There was an obscure checkbox that needed to be clicked off on the setup screen of the printer.  When I clicked it off, the printer worked properly.

A few weeks later, Barb couldn’t access her live.ca email on her laptop.  She could access it on her iPod.  I couldn’t access her email on my laptop either.  I tried my hotmail account on her computer and didn’t have the problem.  So I thought it was something wrong with live.ca.  I tried to get help from Microsoft but they only support the hotmail accounts that you pay for. 

I phoned Rogers to see if they could help.  The first person I talked to couldn’t help me.  Then I got on a Rogers help desk chat line.  The lady took control of my computer.  She found the problem was the router.  When I hooked the computer directly to the Rogers box, I had no problem accessing live.ca.  Fortunately, I still had my old router and was able to hook it up again.  It worked fine for live.ca.

I tried to take the router back to the store where I bought it.  They wouldn’t believe me that the router could have a problem with just one website and not with any others.  They also said that my 30 day return policy had just run out and they wouldn’t refund my money. 

So I brought the router home.  I decided to try to hook it up again.  This time it had no trouble with live.ca.  But now I couldn’t seem to get the printer working through the router.  So we have the new router again but have to bring our computers downstairs and hook them up to the printer directly to print things out.  Maybe next year, I will try to get it all working properly with the new router.