Netgear DGN1000SP connectivity (wireless and wired)

And the time has once again arrived for me to ask for help.

Starting around a week ago I began to have problems connecting to my router via wifi; after turning my laptop on I would simply have "No Internet Access" and could remedy this by toggling the in-built adapter.
Then that stopped working.

For the past several days I have had to power cycle the router in order to reestablish a connection, and even then it has not been immediate; while Windows would report a stable connection, I would recieve no packets whatsoever. Within a few minutes this would sort itself out.
Then that stopped working.

Tonight I experienced what is, to me, the most bizarre connectivity problems to my memory. I got home from work and as usual switched on the laptop; "No Internet Access". Powercycled, after a few minutes it started working. Fired up the PS3 and stuck on Lovefilm to watch a bit of old school Buffy (yeah that's right, the vampire slayer!) and all was well.
It wasn't long after that when once again my laptop just plain dropped out. Here is a list of things I tried, in no particular order:

- Reconnecting to the wifi network; met with "Windows could not connect..." after manually disconnecting.
- Logging off and back on; no change
- Reboot; no change
- Plugged in a wired connection; "No Internet Access", also labelled my network as "Belkin54g", which is my secondary router upstairs which is physically switched off at the mains and has been for three days.
- Shutdown and power on; no change
- Plugged in a wired connection; didn't even recognise that a cable had been plugged in. I have it set to automatically prioritise a wired connection and it did absolutely nothing to show that a cable was plugged in.

- Tried connecting via my tablet; recieved an endless "Connecting..." dialogue.


My first thoughts, a few days ago, were that the router was to blame, yet my Android tablet has been showing the same signs with the only difference that most of the time when my laptop took a while to realise the signal was there (when I'd cycled the router), the tablet would connect instantly.
So then I figured it must be the router, right?

Except the PS3 remained streaming happily the entire time, and my connection isn't fast enough for it to have buffered the entire episode by the time I began having this much more advanced problem tonight.


As usual my recounting is disjointed and a mess of details so do of course ask me to clarify any issues. My main question though is Should I just replace my router?

Honestly I haven't tried this. I finally ragequit the Netgear and switched to the Linksys which is working perfectly, also used my laptop at a different place today and the wireless was spot-on, eliminating it as a potential culprit.

I've always been reluctant to upgrade things, though, due to a long history of bad updates (usually only when they're brand new releases though) killing many a device. Too many manufacturer's use the first people to download updates as a sort of beta group, though granted the firmware for my NG is going to be old enough by now to have gone through those trials.

I suppose I'll have to try that tomorrow, the Linksys is only G which I know is going to bug me if I do want to use it long-term. It needs a peripheral aerial to be any good, anyway :I

Not overly keen on buying new things if I can bodge an old one, I'm very much the skinflint! I'm going to try the NG update tomorrow and if it doesn't work I'll just settle for the Linksys and grab a 2.4 aerial from work. Might even reactivate the wireless on my Belkin to give me a bit of coverage upstairs, just a bit more hassle and it tends to try and take over the network and wrest control away from the primary/modem router if I access it's configuration page :I

Well poop. It seems because this was a Virgin Media branded NG I cannot actually use NG updates, and the current firmware on the device is Virgin's newest. I'll try a full factory reset and give it a day or so to see how it handles (this problem is intermittent, Wednesday night for example, it behaved perfectly) and then get back to you.