Why be nervous you mean? Well just because that's the way I am. :-p

1) You don't know why the person is selling the thingy.
This is almost always true, of course.

2) You don't know whether it works properly.
Even if it's one that has a great reputation, maybe that particular one is a lemon. Maybe they've already tried the reset/firmware thingy without success.

3) If you have problems with it, getting satisfaction will likely take much longer than returning a new one to a store.
There's the usual eBay hassle if you're impatient: You wait for the auction to end, you win the auction, you wait for the seller to respond to your payment, you wait for the seller to ship the item, you wait for it to be delivered, you spend an hour or few setting it up and testing it. If it's crap, you contact the seller and wait for him/her to respond. You return it to him/her and wait to be credited. Or maybe you'll be lucky and it'll be under warranty except you don't have the original purchase receipt or warranty card to prove it. "No warranty for You!" :-(

Or you decide not to put up with the aggravation and throw it away.


Seriously, wireless can be flakey even with good boxes. IIRC, your Netgear thingy worked fine except for a few sites with strange (or maybe, unusual) proxies. (I agree 100% that the router shouldn't care and shouldn't crash based on things like that.) Remember what Greg said about your [link|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=188484|Buffalo]?

I've bought used IBM keyboards, a couple of used cell phones, and lots of non-electronic stuff on eBay and have almost always been very happy. I wouldn't buy 802.11 boxes there just yet though.

But that's just me. :-)

Have you found a sucker^wnoobie^wcolleague willing to take it off your hands yet? ;-)

Cheers,
Scott.