Never been this close to taking a hammer to my router...

Yeah, I'm starting to get annoyed with this little problem. Every couple of hours my friggin router stops responding. All at once on every computer in the house it drops the wireless signal or gives me "local area connection unplugged" (we have a collection of wired and wireless computers connected to it. I have to turn it off then back on to get work again. The router is a Westell Versalink327W, I have tried resetting it and all that simple troubleshooting crap but with no luck. This really wouldn't be half as bad if it wasn't in the basement (and the longest POSSIBLE walk in the house is from my room in the upstairs to the basement, it gets annoying), but I should probably figure out what the problem is. Ohh, the only real symptom I can give you is that it happens much more frequently when downloading something via bittorent (on any of the computers), but it does still happen periodically even when I'm not. Any ideas/suggestions/hints? I have a feeling this piece of crap is on its last leg, verizon must have looked for the cheapest possible router to send us.

 

Anyone? Anything?

 

Have you tried upgrading the router f/w? Is the router overheating?

 

your router is probably having a hernia trying to keep up with the I/O of the bittorrent stuff, overheating, and shutting itself down to keep from damaging stuff.

you might try giving zx10guy a PM on the forums to see if he can give you a recommendation. heck, he might even post in the thread.

 

I agree with BigV on its proably over heating. Turn off all BT and see if it stays up. If the Westell was provided by your ISP contact them and tell them it is craping out.

 

Or put a fan on it to help with the heat.

 

That westell unit is a combined modem and router is it not?
did you get it from verizon? While generally Westells are solid, they are not very good at taking lots of heavy load. Bittorrent will rip up a router easily. The overheating is a likely candidate.
The best thing to do, if it is a combined router/modem like I suspect, is get a REAL router. Set your Westell to bridge and your router to use DHCP and it should fix most problems. Again though, bittorent can bring many consumer routers to their knees. We went through 3 in my last apartment.
The Linksys WRT54GL is the first I've had handle everything thrown at it.

 

Buy a better router.

And smashing routers is actually kind-of-fun.

 

Thanks everyone, I'll follow up on a few of these (I have a good netgear router just sitting around but I was never able to figure out how to bridge the two and do all of that, can you point me toward a guide that might help me along?). I'm going to call verizon and just see if they will replace it (though I'm sure they won't). Yeah, in all honesty I should get cable because I'm pretty much using a LOT of bandwidth 24/7, I get my moneys worth, but I don't really have the extra cash to do that now so let me see if I can fix this little problem.

 

Thanks a ton man.