Courtasy of a couple of power cuts earlier in the week which affected most of the City Centre and as far out as the University Campus I had to replace my trustworthy Netgear DG834G router. At first it only appeared to be the power adapter which had gone however yesterday the modem inside of the router failed and forced me to replace it.

Now networking products are a point of contention for me, there are certain brands I just refuse to buy on principle, the worst being Linksys. Despite being owned by Cisco Systems, I just keep reading about how bad their equipment is and so despite being cheaper, I still avoid them. Belkin and D-Link are supposedly allright but  when it comes to routers and networking I work on the same principle I do with hard drives; If a brand hasn’t failed on it’s own within it’s reasonable lifespan then why change?

So sticking with the devil I know I bought another Netgear and effectively the same one, the DG834GT which has 108mb wireless instead of 54mb and came with a USB wireless dongle, that was the only difference. Thanks to the handy configuration backup and restore facility on both routers I could copy the settings across instantly so no need to re-write 30 or so port forwarding rules.

Everything is back online and working quite happily again.