After 3 years of service, my old router is finally reach the end of its life. I was working fine all along until last week. It starts to drop IP address every few minutes, and I have to manually restart the cable modem to let it reacquire the IP address. It is odd that it doesn’t work if I only restart the router. At first I thought it is the problem with Shaw’s central DHCP server. I called their technical support. To my surprise, the guy is actually quite knowledgable and helpful. He opened a trouble shooting ticket with a reference number for me and advise me experiment bypassing the router, hook up the cable modem with my PC directly. The connection is very stable when I don’t use the router, so I know it’s time for me to get a new one. I got a Linksys router from Futureshop with $30 rebate. Not a bad deal. I didn’t go for the post 802.11g routers, they are more expensive and not supported by all Wi-Fi nodes. Moreover, I don’t even have a laptop to use the wireless connection. I am quite happy with my new router. It is very stable for the first day and my BT download speed seems improved too. Tonight, the DNS of my router suddenly die. It was fixed after I restart the router. I hope it is just a single incident. My Linksys router has won PC Magazine’s editor choice, it gota be good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"