Anyone have a suggestion for an inexpensive, reliable router?
I would not recommend Netgear. They are junk. I have had a couple of the cheaper ones at home and some of the higher end units at work an they all need to be rebooted quite often.
I'm going to go with Tyler's suggestion of Buffalo Routers. I did a little research on them and they are apparently top notch.
Does anyone else have one of these and if you do have one did you load 3rd party software (particularly tomato) onto it?
If you did... let me know why and what was involved.
OOOOH LAWD HAVE MERCY!!!!! 
Just kidding Mike, im right there with you. My hard drive died friday night on me with no warning in the middle of playing Fallout 3. I mean its DEAD dead. No coming back.
Heres to broken computers! 
If it's inside of 5 years there should be a manufacturer's warranty on the sucker. What was the serial on it?
I checked it. It was a seagate drive that came with a dell machine.
Read this, and if it applies Seagate can unbrick it [free shipping] and recover your data for free.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/17/0115207
I'm going to go with Tyler's suggestion of Buffalo Routers. I did a little research on them and they are apparently top notch.
Does anyone else have one of these and if you do have one did you load 3rd party software (particularly tomato) onto it?
If you did... let me know why and what was involved.
I never have had to and I have one that is only about a year old (a second router for the other side of my house). I'm thinking that could get kinda messy.
OOOOH LAWD HAVE MERCY!!!!! 
Just kidding Mike, im right there with you. My hard drive died friday night on me with no warning in the middle of playing Fallout 3. I mean its DEAD dead. No coming back.
Heres to broken computers! 
If it's inside of 5 years there should be a manufacturer's warranty on the sucker. What was the serial on it?
I checked it. It was a seagate drive that came with a dell machine.
Read this, and if it applies Seagate can unbrick it [free shipping] and recover your data for free.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/17/0115207
thanks man!

i read about firmware issues with the 7200.11, but i have a 7200.10 with 3.ADA firmware. there werent any updates from the seagate site. After trying everything i could, i took the drive apart to see what i could do/see, and i dont think theres much i could have done.... one of the heads were messed up somehow. attached is a picture of the platter. For you guys that dont know, it should look completely unblemished. just shiny. AKA no circles at all.
As far as routers, linksys has a life of about 13-16 months, then they start to crap out. DLink isnt that good. Cisco routers are really good, but expensive. Netgear has its good and bad days...