When is it time to replace Modem/Routers?

[jstijerina]

My modem supplied by cable provider is about 4 years old. Same age as my router. I've been having lots of problems lately having to reset one and/or both. Is it time to replace them?

[Tin]

Do you download alot of stuff? Ive used 3 routers thus far, all Linksys...and from day one they need to be powered down periodically because the internal memory chokes from large downloads. I built myself a Smoothwall box thats worlds above and beyond a standard desktop router...and best of all, it was free. It can run quite nicely on a standard 100MHz Pentium with 32MB of RAM...but once you start adding mods to it, more CPU and memory may be necessary. Its also far more secure and can be configured in many different ways. If youre interested check out www.smoothwall.org.

[mojo]

Gotta agree with Tin here. I personally run IPcop, http://ipcop.org , but they are extremely similar and IPCop is just the first one I tried. IPCop seems to have a slightly more active development community and more mods, but smoothwall has better forums. I've run over 50 concurrent bittorrent downloads and it doesn't even break a sweat.