I’ve never had much luck with routers from any of the major brands (although I haven’t tried Apple). I mean, it’s a simple piece of hardware/software, so it shouldn’t be that hard to at least make it work. They either require random reboots or “power cycling,” or they have some silly deficiency like crashing when Azureus exists or the inability to do static DHCP (without it, your IPs will frequently change when using DHCP, making port-forwarding useless).

Then I installed Linux (OpenWRT) on a new Linksys router and hooked it up to its own power supply, so storms don’t knock it out. Since then, my router hasn’t turned off or stopped working in 2/3 of a year. Here’s its status:

Host Name: OpenWrt
Uptime: 265 days

Haven’t had to think about it in a long time. It just works, always. Not bad for consumer hardware.