Johannes and I bought a Samsung CLP-510N color laser printer for our company a couple of months back. This model can run as a network printer, but you have to buy a special replacement network card for the printer if you want the printer to be able to access the network wirelessly. Fine, but the network card for the printer costs about two-thirds what the printer itself costs. Ridiculous!

Wires are annoying, though, so I thought a good solution would be to install a wireless ethernet adapter for the printer. The wireless adapter cost a third of what the network card would have cost. The ethernet adapter I bought, the Belkin Wireless G Gaming Adapter, had several reviews talking about how easy it is to set up. I went ahead and bought it.

Today I went to set up the adapter. I started following the directions on the quick-start guide in the box. I connected the adapter to the wireless router and started the software, and was greeted with the following image:

“Shit”, I thought. The “next” button was greyed out: the adapter configuration software wasn’t detecting the gaming adapter on the LAN. Not good—since we have a secured WLAN, I needed to connect the wireless network adapter to the LAN first to configure it to access the WLAN. I tried everything I could think of to get the LAN to see the gaming adapter, but to no avail. After about 10 minutes of useless futzing around, I happened to mouse-over the “next” button on the configuration software.

*headdesk*

The buttons were grey, but they weren’t “greyed out” as per Windows UI conventions. Annoyed at having wasted so much time because the UI designer for this software was an idiot, I clicked on the “next” button and had the adapter installed and working in about 10 seconds.

Lesson learned: Making buttons with mouse-overs greyed-out when they’re active but not being hovered over is a very bad idea. Some UI conventions cannot be flouted.