So I ended up picking up a new router after bricking my good old WRT54G which I have had for a long time and served me well but kinda left we wanting more. That is probably why I was pushing a firmware upgrade to the router only to have it fail and brick it. So after doing a bunch of research as far as what was available at MicroCenter and reading reviews from NewEgg and Amazon I ended up with a D-Link DIR-655 Wireless N.
The main thing I was looking for in a router was stability and supportability I had a few other things in my mind that I figured would be awesome if I could find but were not too big of deal breakers. One thing that really led me to choose D-Link was their support network and the forums and their emulator of their firmware. The emulator was nice because it let me test drive the options of the router before buying it, why more companies don’t do that I will never know. Also you have the ability to easily download old firmware if you need to downgrade after an update. The forum was a welcome support link for the router but as usual you have to take those with a grain of sand as there seems to be a lot of angry people out there! Although I did take the biggest advice of the forum and did not upgrade to the latest firmware as it seems to have a lot of issues, and is not something you can remove after installing it. I figured since 80211N just made gold that there would be another update coming soon anyways.
A nice feature of this router is I have the ability to set up schedules. So I can open my FTP port for the 1 hour I need it to do my automated website backups. I can also do some port mapping from incoming external port to another internal port in my network. I also get some very useful logs and a whole bunch of other buttons and options to change (QoS, DHCP Priority Address, Guest Access, Email new Firmware, Uptime Clock). I can also enable a second WiFi hotspot with a different security level for guests so I can easily open and close a non-secure wireless access point. And it has a gigabit switch to boot so that is helpful for all four ports which i have plugged into my PS3, DirecTV, Media Center, and weather station.
It was on sale for $99 at MicroCenter and has turned out to be a very good router. I have tested it by pumping a ton of data through it via Bit-Torrent and Hulu and downloading 1GB files from FTP all at once without a hiccup (well my cable modem did reboot but don’t think that was the router’s fault). So this router gets my vote!
UPDATE – I have found some other settings that are particularly useful with this new router. Looks like you can setup a dynamic DNS account and setup the router to ping the service and update your IP if it changes so you can have a static URL go to your home server.
As far as stability goes this thing seems to be fairly solid, it likes to reboot every once and a great while and does it by itself and just looks like it takes a long time for a page to reload when it happens, so no really effected services. I have also been making a bunch of changes to the config of the router which require reboot so that kinda screws up my uptime counts.
So I finally decided to jump into 2001 and upgrade our cable package to include HD programming. After creating a spread sheet and running the numbers of my current Comcast cable/internet package and moving to DirectTV I found that I save a whopping $6/month on service and I get all the HD channels and an addition 50 channels. I decided to keep my internet with Comcast as unfortunately that is one thing that they actually do very well. I picked the choice package which has 150 channels and then picked up the HD package and an HD DVR. The DVR has a 500GB HD and holds 40 hours of HD TV and 200 hours of standard def. It also has 2 USB ports and 1 eSATA port so you can easily add an additional external drive. And yes they actually work unlike the Comcast or Tivo boxes that you have to kinda hack to get those ports working. HDMI out makes super easy installation to the TV and it has 2 ethernet plugs (not sure why, wish I had a redundant internet connection!) so it is hardwired to my network. The internet is how it downloads the On Demand features.
Why it took so long for these products to actually materialize I will never know. I always have kept a USB drive on my key chain but I have had issues with it breaking or being a little too bulky or fragile. These new ones from Lacie are all metal and the shape of your keys so they fall in line super easily. Since they are a whopping $27 for 8 GB I think I will be picking one of these up when they come back in stock. Check them out: 
I couldn’t help myself and I have to post this as I think it sums up things very very well!
Wow why can’t I like things that are cheap? These watches are amazing and I really really need one. The best part is the ad that Tag has on their site starts off with an R8. What can I say we are made for each other. Check out the images from Autoblog and then Tag’s site below.
