I have a Netgear DG834N router and up till now its been pretty stable (its 4 years old) – in the past 3 days however, the WIFI has been flaky, and I have to keep restarting the router for the WIFI to work.

I haven’t tried messing with ‘channels’ yet as its set to Auto and its supposed to look for a free/vacant channel.

anybody else had a router go flaky with old age?

Those routers are so cheap it really isn’t worth trying to fix it – just get another

Possibly a neighbour has just added one using the same channel as you….

nowt lasts these days….

@Footflaps – hmm, I’ll try another channel and see if it helps

My Netgear had been dropping out, WGR614 about 11 years old. We changed to Virgin Superhub, but this kept dropping when Jnr was on Xbox live. Switched off the wifi on the superhub and connected the Netgear, but our connection went shockingly slow (50ish mb down to about 4mb).

Turned the superhub wifi back on, but scanned the channels and moved it to one that had less crossover with neighbours. Seems a lot better now.

I replaced an old netgear router recently and the new router is much better (Airport Extreme). Uses to reboot the old one all the time.

I’ve had a couple of netgears go that way. No amount of channel changing or firmware updating helped. Seems odd that something that gets taken out of its box, wired up then left completely untouched on a high shelf for 2 years should just suddenly wear out but there you go.