Over the past few weeks, I've had a lot of unexplained outages for my home internet connection. It's not been my ISP (at least Time Warner always claims there's no outage in my area when I call). And the outages either last a couple minutes, max, or if prolonged, they immediately vanish when I unplug my router, wait a couple minutes, then plug it back in.
The router is a Netgear MR814, more than five years old. I have a pretty decent and recent XP machine hardwired into it from the modem, and it supports, through a wireless connection, three other computers in our house. The firmware for the router is the most current version, although that is several years old.
I know nothing lasts forever, but it really looks like my internet outages are traceable to the router (I've had Time Warner out to check the modem and it's fine). What confuses me is that I'd think that if the router were to go bad, it would just die and not work, ever, period. What I have is 98%+ uptime, always fixable by recycling the router. Can routers die like this?
If I need to replace the router, what's a good recommendation? I don't need anything fancy. I have my eyes on a Netgear WGR614, although that too is a pretty old model.