It’s Official: Belkin Products Suck

In general, I try to give a company several chances to prove itself to me – I know that product defects happen, and that just because I happen to get a defective product, doesn’t mean that other people are going to have the same problem. Last night, however, was the last straw. Over the past year, I’ve had two defective Belkin KVM switches (the expensive DVI kind) go bad on me (one was bad right out of the box), I had a defective Belkin 802.11g router, a flaky pre-802.11n router that never worked right, and last night the last straw: I bought two Belkin wireless mouse/keyboard combo units from Dell a few months ago, 50% off, for only $20 each. I figured for that price, what did I have to lose? I’d keep ’em as spare units. I decided to take one over to my in-laws house to set up because they commented that someday they wanted to buy a wireless mouse/keyboard. I struggled with the setup for 30 minutes, including changing batteries, before I finally determined that the unit was defective. I tried setting it up on my laptop and had no luck there either. So from now on, I’m avoiding all Belkin products like the plague – they just don’t have the right level of quality control for me to trust their brand again.