Linksys WAG 160N Crashing

So.. your WAG160N keeps crashing. Linksys have been absolutely useless with support for this product, and there are definately alot of unhappy people. The old WRT54G was an awesome little wireless router, so good in fact I had 4 of them, and they made me fall in love with linksys, the WAG160N however, has made me HATE linksys.

But anyways, so you've got one, your stuck with it, and it keeps locking up, crashing and being an overall pain in the ass.

Right now, I've got mine setup to the point where I don't have to physically get up, walk to the hallway, and reset the modem. it's always working, and it's all pretty solid. But it did take some effort, and a couple of extra little things.

1. Update the firmware to V1.00.15. This made a huge difference for me, and was a massive step forward for linksys in regards to fixing up this product. But although it was a massive step forward, it's still far from perfect, and unfortunately it doesn't look like linksys will develop any more firmwares for this product.

2. 120mm Cooling Fan - See my other post in this blog. The WAG160N gets really hot, and I found that that caused alot of instability, keeping it cool definately helps.

3. An electronic timer switch. Like this one pictured below is an awesome investment. Because my ISP has peak/off-peak times for downloading, I've got all my downloads set to start at 2am, when my off-peak time begins. What I found was when the modem was going from no load to MAX load it would crap itself and lock up, so, I've got the electronic timer switch to turn off the modem for 1 minute then turn it back on at 2:05am, and again at 6am. Most people that have this modem, have to manually restart it at least once a day, by having the tiimer switch, it'll do it for you.

4. Modified Settings - Now, there are a couple of little settings you can tweak in the modem config to make it more stable. The changes are:

1. Change the MTU to 1350
2. Change Wireless Radio Band to Standard - 20MHz Channel
3. Change Standard Channel to 13 - 2.472GHz
4. Change Beacon Interval to 75ms
5. Change Fragmentation Threshold to 2304
6. Change RTS Threshold to 2304

Here's how you change these settings in pictures:

That's pretty much it. These are the 4 things I've done and I've got a pretty solid modem now, the wireless doesn't drop out, and adsl never craps itself, it all just seems to work, like it should've in the first place.

As a side note, linksys have recently released and new hardware version(2.0), which means they probably won't be releasing any more firmware updates for the troublesome v1.0, which sucks. I'd love to have mine just run, without a fan, without having to be reset every night, but I think that there is very little hope for us poor 1.0 owners now.