V1 revision - A defective design that suffers from overheating and poor quality capacitors (Linksys Wireless-G ADSL Gateway WAG54G)

Member Name: SnooP_WiggleS

Product:	Linksys Wireless-G ADSL Gateway WAG54G
Date:	10/12/07 (186 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: rich feature set, wireless, everything the adsl user needs.

Disadvantages: design defects lead to very poor reliability, still some firmware bugs that never got fixed

I won't go into as much detail about features and such of this router, the other review makes for excellent reading of these. In short this has everything, application firewall, wireless 54-G, 4 port hub, port forwarding, everything the adsl user needs. However i should stress the reliability of this model is somewhat flawed. Both mine and a friends routers have had similar issues, both due to design defects. The issue is poor quality capacitors that often fail after a few months of use. This results in problems such as the ethernet connections no longer working at 100mbps but only at 10mbps, or even not at all. I experienced this and sure enough replacing the appropriate capacitors fixed the issue.

this forum post (see link below) explains the issues, the high internal temperatures (thanks to no cooling whatsoever, no airflow since theres no fans, and cheap capacitors that can't handle the heat) results in a low lifespan. Replacing the capacitors fixes the issues, but no consumer can be expected to do that!

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-arch ive.cfm/615804.html

Also on hot days the router sometimes crashes under load due to the main chip having no cooling whatsoever - no heatsink even. I drilled some holes and added a small 40mm fan to it and that fixed the issues mostly, its now cool to touch instead of being too hot to touch. So now my modded linksys router is almost flawless, - bittorrent never crashes the router where it used to. The firmware is still a bit buggy though, i can get the router to reset fairly consistently by making a large search in dc++ (say a flood of 1000 results to the search in a second or two). All in all the V1 revision of this router(what i have) is a poor design, lets hope Linksys has learned from their mistakes and updated the design for future models. if this forum is anything to go by, V2 hasn't fixed the issues:

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm? t=508557&p=1
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm? t=312908&p=81

Summary: Like a lot of cheap netgear stuff, a poor router not recommended for anyone.

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