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Thursday 1 September 2005

Router fux0r4g3 [Am]

Part and parcel of hosting an AmLan every year-ish is that the clan come round my gaff, play lots of games, shout at each other and blow up my current router.
Last year it was a Netgear 834 or something (which died as soon as the first cunt got in the building), this year a Linksys Wireless-G series which had always worked flawlessly - I mean really flawlessly - until it got loaded with a bunch of blokes trying to play WoW and download a few patches. Its web-interface crawled to a stop and it basically kept fucking up. Before it went down, a quick interweb search turned up this thing was a bit of a 3 leg mule.
This thing was hot and in the end we worked out that pointing a fullblown deskfan at it was good enough to keep it going. But now of course it is seriously winking out, some 10 months into purchase. Have I got the receipt? Does the Pope shit in the woods without a paddle? Of course I ain't.
Anyway here's the deal. The netgear was shit and died at AmLan 1. The linksys was pretty good on the face of it until it too died after 8 months at AmLan 2 and was in fact also shown to be a piece of shit.
I need a recommendation for a really solid serious router. I need something that doesn't die. I need something that will work at AmLan 3 (provided there is one since the missus is still slightly resentful and unmediated about the b&b stay with two kids for two nights - eek). Give me a *decent* recommendation not the cheapest x-from-y solution. For god's sake give me a router that can last more than one more year and one more AmLan!

3 comments:

  1. A a denzien of the interweb, did you not buy the router online? In which case trawl your email for a receipt or check your order history at the usual e-tailers.
    Contact linksys and request an RMA on the thing as well, won't do any harm.
    As for next year, do what the rest do....buy whatever lurks gets!

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  2. Actually I've never had a good adsl router. Everyone I tried crapped out under the pretty heavy loads I subjected them to at my gaff (in fairness there's 4 other flats bumming off my connection). Since I use cable these days, I went through no less than half a dozen different ethernet routers to find a pukka one and I think those blogs are on site, having eventually settled on the Linksys WRT54G.
    So I'm not too much use to you but I do know a few people who use the Netgear stuff okay. Your usage isn't crazy so I'd be surprised if that didn't suffice. If you were sick of the uncertainty, you could go and buy a Linksys WRT54G and then buy a seperate Ethernet ADSL modem to plug into it. It'll cost more money but that's what I'm going to do when I go back to ADSL later in the year after I move somewhere without cable.
    In short, I'm sure there is a rock solid unit out there but I can't vouch for one. Linksys did fairly recently launch a new combined ADSL wireless router and I think the chances are pretty high that this is up to the standard of their other current gear. That might be worth trolling for reviews and forum posts about as it would be a cheap alternative and might just be the business. It's called the WAG54GS. Totally different box from the WAG54G you had that was a peice of shit. But I could understand once bitten, twice shy type stuff.

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  3. An update then; after looking askance at all the usual suspects (Netgear, DLink, Linksys, Assbit etc), I followed the advice of one of the IT blokes in work and went with a Draytek Vigor 2600. This company wins *all sorts of shit* www.draytek.co.ukNow as Slim pointed out, Draytek's are a bit more than your off the shelf routers which in my previous 3 incarnations have all been killed by electricdeath. I think he said something about "use them at work and they are great if you'll pay for em" but they are actually not that much more and frankly, given the history of deathage at the hands of t' 'death, this was an equation that worked pretty easily.I've had it now for several months and the thing is just *rock* solid. There's loads of additionals if you can be bothered to look through the spec like lots of remote and throttling-bandy-by-port stuff. We pay up for l33t cpus and vidcards so I would seriously recommend, next time you're in the lookout for a router, that you consider this lot too.

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