On The Phone With Netgear Support

I was upgrading the firmware on my SC101 (with the caveat “Do not interrupt upgrade process”) when we had a brief brown-out (35+ MPH wind gusts all day long).  The upgrade has run for about 45 minutes by this time, a length of time that was already making me nervous.  Once everything came back on-line, I could no longer connect to the SC101.  Bad news, since I had a lot of photographs as well as my iTunes library on there.

I submitted an on-line incident to Netgear Tech Support at 5:54 PM their time (1:54 PM my time), and had a response at 11:52 PM their time.  6 hours is a great response time, but the instructions were to call Netgear Tech Support to diagnose a hardware issue, or get an RMA.

After about 10 min on the phone, I was told to take the device back to Staples (since it’s still under the 30–day warranty there).  If Staples won’t exchange it, I can send it back to Netgear for a replacement.

Not quite the outcome I was hoping for (I was hoping to fix it today), but overall not a bad experience.  While I’m at Staples, I’m going to invest in a small UPS backup.