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That old router I found in my parents' basement was free after $0 spent on firmware
I dug up a dusty Linksys WRT54G from 2006 at my folks' place last weekend, flashed it with DD-WRT in about 20 minutes, and now my neighbor's Wi-Fi snooping stopped cold has anyone else seen a crazy improvement from junk hardware like that?
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felix_thomas7312h ago
Flashed a WRT54GL with DD-WRT myself after my ISP's router kept dropping connection every time someone used the microwave. Turned off the wireless N features and locked it to G-only mode, and suddenly I could stream Netflix in the backyard without buffering. The firewall options in DD-WRT let me block some sketchy traffic my kid's tablet was getting from ad servers too. Those old Linksys boxes are like the Nokia 3310 of routers - they just refuse to die if you give them a decent firmware.
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Oh those old WRT54G models are tanks. I flashed one with Tomato firmware a few years back just to mess around and it breathed new life into the thing. The range on the 2.4ghz band alone beat out my newer dual band router for basic tasks. Just make sure you set a proper password since the old default security was a joke.
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