On black friday this past year I decided to pick up a new wireless router. The wireless N support was obviously a nice selling point, but the key feature for me was the range booster. I like to work on my laptop in different rooms around the house and some are pretty far from my wireless router. The range booster helps to transmit the signal farther and stronger than a standard router, resulting in a better experience in all rooms of the house or office.

The router I ended up buying was the Cisco/Linksys WRT160N. I’ve owned Linksys routers for years and have always had a good experience with them.

After a simple and quick install I was up and running wirelessly, or so I thought. After a few minutes my wireless connection started giving me problems. The connection would drop every few minutes and then pick up again a few seconds later. This was annoying and rendered the router completely and utterly useless.

Having your wireless router drop the connection on a regular basis is a fairly common problem. You may encounter this problem after many months or even years of good use out of the router. Of course there is always the possibility that something is faulty with the router itself. There is, however, one important step that may fix the problem and get your router back on track. It worked perfectly in the above-mentioned scenario and has worked for me numerous times in the past. Read the rest of this entry »