Router Replacement with old defective router?

DEFECTIVE ROUTERS? ... brought back to life?

I think I have possibly blogged about this before, or twittered it or something, but it has happened again, and I'm confused!

About every month or so I have to replace my router. It just all of a sudden quits allowing a wireless connection but still allows a hard wired connection, or it will just start locking up every few minutes and I will have to power cycle the router to get internet access again. What I don't understand is that it does this quite often, and nothing I do seems to fix it. I have upgraded the firmware, positioned the equipment away from any EMI waves. I can go in and reset to default, reconfigure it with static ips or with dhcp either one, and it will still give me problems. I have tried to use the routers plugged in to a UPS and without the UPS..... this has been going on with different routers for about a year (if not more!). I have a crate of the old routers in the shed, and what is weird is when the router dies... I can go get another router (that was once dead) and plug it back up ... reconfigure it.. and it will work fine for a month or so until it does the same thing! Is it a conspiracy against me? Is it my ISP doing it because I have too many connections on my dsl line? Am I overloading my routers?.. different routers? Any suggestions?

Oh By the Way.. Window Update

Sorry... I should have posted this before the motherboard blog.

I finally got my window put in on Friday. Exactly 15 days of patiently waiting. I have to say that it was done correctly...perfectly level, the colors and trim matched exactly with the other windows, and most importantly it did not leak. We had 2 days of rain this week on Wed and Thursday, and it did not leak a drop. So even though it took longer than expected, and I was getting aggravated because of the disorder... it was done great and I have no other complaints. It sure is nice to see out to the main road now!

Diagnosis of a Bad Motherboard!

I hate telling someone that their motherboard is the problem, but sometimes it happens. For me personally it is hard to accept. I have spent many hours on a $20 diagnostic trying everything possible to bring a system back to life.... only to finally give in and tell the customer they need a new motherboard and most likely a new processor and RAM to fit that motherboard. From my experience, motherboard damage can be as small as the onboard video needing to be replaced with a video card to as major as bulged capacitors leaking residue on to the motherboard and it not powering on at all.

To determine a bad motherboard I follow a basic procedure of taking a part out at a time and powering on the system after each part is removed.

Test and Replace the Power Supply if necessary
Then Remove any PCI cards from their slots one at a time.
Remove video card / Use onboard VGA (or use another known good vga card)
Then disconnect the cd rom and dvd drives one at a time.
Then disconnect the hard drive(s) one at a time.
Remove a stick of RAM (Memory) one at a time.
Remove all RAM from the system (do you hear a beep code?)
Reseat the processor, replace with a known good working one if necessary.

If you are down to just the motherboard, a known good processor, a known good power supply and a known good video source and you still cannot get the computer to POST (or even power on at all) than you have a bad motherboard.