>>>I do not visit Starbucks ->>>

Your saga reminds me of the time I bought a super deal on a kid's 8GB Coby tablet from Toys-Я-Us in a shopping center mall. Brought it home. I could not get it to connect despite all my other devices had no problems. So I hustled back on up to the mall for a refund or exchange on the defective tablet.

Clerk turns the thing on. At least a dozen hotspots in the mall were immediately detected by the defective machine. Clerk immediately connects to the Toys-Я-Us wifi and the internet. To make matters worse, he also connects to the PetCo hotspot next door with no problem.

I was devastated. Returned home with the defective Coby. After about another week of fiddling with the LinkSys router wifi settings without adversely affecting my other devices, the defective Coby was finally cured. While this probably means the Coby & Cisco hardware were probably OK, I blame them anyway. 🙂

Likely due to not wanting to try WiFi there… Or no locations handy.

> > I have come to the conclusion that this tablet is just a lemon, for the 1st day I received it.> >

Agreed. Probably best way to deal with something like this is to declare/deem it a "lemon" ASAP after you first suspect it might be so. Don't mess with it. Return it to the vendor as defective for an exchange or refund BEFORE the vendor's return merchandise authorization (RMA) period expires. After that, warranty service can sometimes be a long drawn-out frustrating experience with any manufacturer.