Broke my own rule about not buying used electronics from flea markets

Picked up a "vintage" router at the St. Louis flea market for $12 and spent 14 hours over two days trying to get it to connect to my network before realizing the firmware was from 2005 and basically bricked. Has anyone else wasted a whole weekend on a gadget that should have been thrown out immediately?

3 comments

3 Comments

sanchez.mary23d ago

Your story reminds me of that time my dad bought a "barely used" printer at a garage sale and spent the whole weekend trying to find drivers for Windows Vista. The thing is, we get so caught up in the idea of a good deal that we ignore all the obvious red flags. After hour one you really gotta ask yourself who's the one getting played here. But honestly, the vintage router community is probably huge now so maybe you could sell it to some collector who wants to stare at it. At least you didn't electrocute yourself trying to fix a 2005 power supply like my cousin did.

christopherh7924d ago

14 hours on a 2005 router? That's on you, man. You could have plugged it in, seen the ancient interface, and called it a day in 20 minutes. I've grabbed old tech from garage sales before but I set a hard limit of 30 minutes messing with it. If it doesn't work by then it goes in the trash. A $12 lesson about not being stubborn is pretty cheap.

emery29024d ago

But did you actually check the firmware version before you started messing with it, or did you just assume it would work because the ports looked fine? I'm curious how you got 14 hours deep without just googling "2005 router firmware update" or something. I've made that mistake before with a cheap switch from a pawn shop, figured a power cycle would fix it but ended up flashing a bad custom firmware and killing it completely. What did you think was gonna happen after the first hour of nothing connecting?