From my previous post here, I recently decided to get a Linksys WRT54GL.

I purchased it from Newegg on a Monday night, and had it in my hands by Wednesday evening. (I love newegg) .

Right away I decided to install a custom firmware. After a little bit of reading I went with Tomato over DD-WRT or OpenWRT. My research concluded that the interface in Tomato was significantly better and the options were comparable.

I’m pretty happy with the whole situation. My internet connection has been significantly better. I use Remote Desktop a lot, and haven’t had it drop yet. My DLINK router dropped my connection every few minutes. I even had trouble with local network remote desktop. I always thought my problems were due to comcast and separately the wireless connection dropping. After a particular maddening incident, I was able to track some of the problems back to the router, so I did the upgrade.

All and all, I’m pretty happy. I did have one problem with Tomato. I setup port forwarding and couldn’t find the stupid save button all the way down on the bottom right. So I spent two days without RDP access because I thought I had setup everything correctly.

Tomato’s best feature has to be the bandwidth graphs, it’s a really neat feature.

I can’t say anything bad about DD-WRT or OpenWRT for I’ve never tried them but I can recommend you give Tomato a chance.

http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato

I’ve heard so many cool things about the WRT54GL and I finally broke down and bought one. I haven’t received it yet but I can’t wait to play with it.

I’ve had a few wired linksys routers in the past, namely when villelink was up in the dorms, and while I lived in a college apartment with 5 people. Needed a solid wired router.

About three years ago I bought the DLINK DI-624 and while I’ve always thought it was okay, I’ve decided to finally ditch it. I’ve stayed up to date on any firmware updates but I constantly get a dropped connection on both my laptop and my home machine. I also had some issues running STEAM for a little while, so I had a $50 newegg.com gift certificate from christmas and I picked a WRT54GL up for $61.00.

I live in a fairly upper-scale apartment complex so it’s literally littered with other routers and I do think interference is some of the issue. I was able to change channels but even then I have to share Channel 1. Hopefully, the WRT54 solves some of these problems.

I think I’ll post an entry when I get it and try to put the linux firmware on it.