December 7, 2008

Signs of a dying router

I replace my router today. It was an Asante FR3000 series that I had for 5 years that has worked relatively well and had a nice feature that let me plug in a printer using a parallel port and have it accessible to all computers on the network. The only major problem I had with the router was it freezing up once in a while, requiring me to unplug the power from it and plug the power back in. This may have been the first sign of it dying, but I do not know how common it is for other routers. The Linksys WRT54GL that I have been using for wireless has never needed rebooting. The freezing up would happen about once a month, but seemed to be a bit more often lately.

Within the last couple of weeks, the router started to slow down my Internet connection to where it was about 3 times slower than usual. Turning it off and on helped it, but it showed up again a week later. I repeated the remedy, but it showed up sooner than a week that time.

So I switched the Asante out with the Linksys. That was a bit more trouble than I expected, as I could not login to the Linksys due to how I had it configured, so I had to reset it. It was smooth sailing from there and my download speed is back to normal.

No comments: