Crappy Orange livebox thingy

[VectraMan]

Anyone with any experience?

My Dad's got two of the bloody things, one at his house in France and one in the UK (my family really isn't as rich as that might sound).

He'd had some problems with the connection, and Orange had told him to reset it to factory settings, after which his wireless wouldn't work. This is where he called family tech support. It had defaulted to WPA, and I knew he'd had it on WEP before, but I thought I may as well set up WPA properly. But it completely failed to work. This was using his Dell XP laptop, his slightly crappy old XP laptop and my Dell Vista laptop, and neither would get past "attempting to connect" or occasionally "limited connectivity".

So I ended up going back to WEP, and got it all going. Not ideal.

Part 2 of the story happened in France a few months before Part 1. His internet connection worked, but only when plugged in and wouldn't work wirelessly. After much faffing around I figured out that the Orange France software (a control panel and a branded version of IE) stopped the wireless connection working. Shut it down, wireless worked everything connects. Start up the Orange software and it kills wireless.

So my conclusion: anything from Orange is a POS. Unfortunately I can't make him understand that he doesn't need to use Orange anything, certainly not their software.

[Flubster]

I've had one since I did Beta testing for VoIP for them a few years back. Only problem I had was where the internet connection would drop for no reason. PCs connected via an ethernet cable couldn't even ping the box although wireless laptops could (?!?!?).

Solution: disable the UPnP option under Configuration --> Advanced. Never had a drop out since and never needed to reboot the box. I have WEP only set but that's as a couple of devices don't use WPA...