Do Old Routers Go Bad?

[Al]

My netgear went bad after 5 years. Pretty easy to diagnose. Measure the speed with it and without it.

Captain Obvious, out.

As was mentioned. Don't spend more than 1 or 2 minutes to diagnose.

 

[sleddriver]

I'll check it out.

Just for grins, I removed my ethernet cables from ports 1 & 2 and plugged them into #'s 3 & 4, then did another speed test. This time it was MUCH faster (2.3Mb/s vs. 1.3. My service is for 3Mb/s. Bypassing the router resulted in 2.55Mb/s down). That's odd. I'll check it periodically and see what happens.

Curiosity pays off yet again. . .

 

[PandaBear]

I used to have that router, it was fine but slow at the beginning since it was an old design, then one day its printer port stopped working, a few years later its flash memory will forget its configuration and not working as intended.

The way IMO it can get slower gradually is the analog components start wearing out and it gets "slower" due to extra retry and lost packet. Bad CRC can cause a lot of bad packets.

 

[Colt45ws]

Originally Posted By: PandaBear
I used to have that router, it was fine but slow at the beginning since it was an old design, then one day its printer port stopped working, a few years later its flash memory will forget its configuration and not working as intended.

The way IMO it can get slower gradually is the analog components start wearing out and it gets "slower" due to extra retry and lost packet. Bad CRC can cause a lot of bad packets.

Awhile back, I was having trouble uploading to my server. I would connect and login fine, but if I tried to actually upload anything, the program would lock up and eventually crash. The way I figured out what was wrong was by firing up cmd and running ping. Pinging anything with maximum payload would result in a 90%+ drop. Smaller packets were fine. I replaced the switch, and it was fine.

 

[sleddriver]

Originally Posted By: sleddriver
I'll check it out.

Just for grins, I removed my ethernet cables from ports 1 & 2 and plugged them into #'s 3 & 4, then did another speed test. This time it was MUCH faster (2.3Mb/s vs. 1.3. My service is for 3Mb/s. Bypassing the router resulted in 2.55Mb/s down). That's odd. I'll check it periodically and see what happens.

Curiosity pays off yet again. . .


Well that 'old-router-lively-ness' was short lived....

I pulled the router from the loop, hooked the 'fuser directly to the modem, reinitialized it to work in 'normal' mode (as opposed to bridge) so I'd have some dwnld speed until I could get a new router. Last night picked up a Netgear N150 wireless router at Fry's. Installed it today, reconfig'd the modem and my speeds are back up.

Glad to be done with that! Thanks to all!