People who support people are the supportingest people in the world

<whine>
I like Linksys. I’ve had their 4-port router for a few years and it just sits there and works. And once when it stopped working they sent me a new one, no questions asked. Compare this to, say, BestBuy. Yesterday I took our Playstation 2 back because when you play a DVD on it, if the video scene is dark, it stops outputting to the TV entirely and then takes a couple of seconds to bring the TV back to life. Even though I’d purchased the “no-hassle” extended warrantee, they had to send a 14 year old employee to the back of the store to verify that the machine was broken. After spinning through all of “Ocean’s 11,” the child reported that the machine worked fine. The manager graciously agreed to replace the unit anyway. “I’m not supposed to do this,” he said, waiting for my gratitude finally to spill over my natural reserve. “Just don’t tell anyone.” Oh, I might actually tell someone that BestBuy actually believed that one of its customer was telling the truth. Sure, you wouldn’t want that to get around!

Anyway, I’m no longer able to play online games. When I try to connect, it just hangs. I’ve reinstalled Wolfenstein and Quake but to no avail. So, I go to linksys.com and don’t get any useful hits searching for information on games. So, I google “linksys games” and .27 seconds later find the linksys FAQ that tells me I need to open port 27960 “in the router’s advanced feature.” The FAQ tells me to consult the manual. So, I open the PDF manual and can’t find where it tells me how to open a port. So, I google “linksys 27960” and in .36 seconds I find a page — GamesAdmin.com — with a user-written, careful description of exactly how to do the deed. In fact, these step-by-step instructions cover the overall setup of the router and are far better than Linksys’ own. And it has a set of very useful links.

Customers not only know more than the companies they deal with, they also write better. </whine>

Categories: Uncategorized dw