A week past Saturday I advised my client to purchase NetGear’s DG834G wireless adsl modem firewall router from PC store that has stores in the UK yet uses ‘World’ in its branding.

Unfortunately, the unit only worked for a couple of days before it was classed as Dead On Arrival. Not to worry, I advised my client to return to the same store and ask for another identical replacement. This is actually a rather nice little unit – it’s a V2 release, it’s white and it’s smaller than my V1 edition (which has been working well since January 2004, I’m very pleased with it).

Last Saturday, I drove the 140 or so miles (round trip) to install the replacement.

Imagine my horror when I discovered that the replacement was a WGT624 wireless firewall router. No built-in ADSL modem. This unit required an ASDL modem for it to work in a similar fashion to the DG834G unit.

So how did my client end up with the wrong product? Well, as you might imagine, it boils down to customer service: the lack of it.

The sales bloke in the world of PCs was keen to extol the virtues of the WGT624: it was 108mbps vs the 54mbps of the DG834G. And it was only a tenner more expensive. What he forgot to mention was that my client would have needed to purchase an ASDL modem too. May be he didn’t forget, may be he didn’t know?

So, my client and I returned to the offending store, WGT624 in hand. We hunted down the sales bloke, who happened to be chatting to the duty manager at the time. The sales bloke was allegedly busy, so the duty manager offered to take over: result! Or so I thought. He then proceeded to pass it over to a different sales bloke who was a little unhelpful (although I think it was their stock system that couldn’t help him) and was unable to confirm if the DG834G was available in a nearby store.

Whilst I was a little reluctant, we ended up replacing the NetGear kit with DLink’s DSM-604T which does include a firewall, despite the box stating just wireless adsl router. Sorry NetGear, but the said store didn’t seem to carry much stock of anything: what it did carry was a very confusing mix of wireless hardware.

The moral of this story: only purchase things from this worldly-wise PC store if you fully understand what you are buying, don’t rely on the staff helping you. My client happily admits that he doesn’t know enough about IT, but he doesn’t need to, that’s what I do for him. He’s now a happy client, which is good for me, but not so good for the PC store in question.