I decided to spluge, since my daughter's been griping incessantly about the lousy signal the litlle Netgear 802.11b router put out. It's true, the unit was years old and wireless signal strength in the next room was about 15%. So today I sallied forth and picked up a band-spankin' new LinkSys WRT150N - backward compatible with 802.11 b,g, and the so-called "super-g". It came with a spiffy cdrom that promised to make installation a breeze. They lie.
Went through it three times, and the dang thing would never recognize my cable modem. I called tech support over in India which is a complete waste of time. Therefore, recognizing that there comes a time when one must seize the bull by the horns, I ripped into the main system. First recovering important little bits of data such as Mac addresses and Ip addresses and DNS server data, and ultimately taking apart the modem itself.
Now, I'm not a neophyte by any means; I've been messing around with computers for over 30 years, but this was a little over the top (by the way, if you run that included cdrom, you'll need to reset the router by depressing a little inset button on the back for 30 seconds - that'll clear out all of the eronneous configuration data that the program writes into the router so that you can overwrite the memory with the correct data).
After five hours, though, I've got everything reassembled, and two systems back online. We'll see about the others a bit later.
This is not a unit for the faint of heart - at one point, my Bride walked in, took a look at the cables and guts strewn around amid the scraps of paper with bits of data scribbled on them, and immediately announced that she was going for a walk. Good move. I've always said that she she could have done a lot better, and I could've done a lot worse.