I have a Cisco Systems Linksys WRT54Gl v1.1 wireless router that has, off and on, being giving me fits. For reasons unknown to me, it will sometimes vanish from the list of available wireless connections on both my wife’s WinXP laptop and our Vista HTPC, both of which are almost always found within the same small bedroom/home office as the router. Other times, it will be listed, but cannot be connected to. This has happened several times a week for the past few months, with unavailable spans lasting as long a day or two. First, I upgraded the original firmware to try to solve the issue, then I replaced it with Tomato, which had the added advantage of letting me assign the printer a static address. It seemed to improve the situation for a time, but now it’s being squirrelly again. Any ideas where to start troubleshooting with this thing?
This may not be of much help. I had a linksys router act flaky. It turned out that the power supply was bad. If you are like me you may have an other compatible power supply from old electronics laying about that you could use instead of the original one and see if that helps. I have read on the web of others having power supply issues with linksys routers.
caveman, the WRT54GL is one of the best Linksys home routers out there (so much so that it is still in production!) Occasionally, they do wear down, and parts malfunction, and that might be what’s going on with your router.
As for the wireless network not being detected, does the problem go away if you restart your router?
It’s reputation was nigh-legendary even back when I bought it several years ago to replace my old b-only D-Link. The prolem, though, persists despite soft and hard restarts.