3 wonky routers in a row, could it be because it's on a speaker?

digitalwanderer

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Not mine, my friend MauiMom from over at EB/my son's best friend's mom. She's been having the weirdest problems with her hubby's PC and their router for a while now and I have been having the hardest time figuring out why!

She's had 3 routers go bad. 3 different brands of varying quality, but all dying pretty much the same way. The routers all reset themselves to their default settings which would mean no internet for them (PPOe) and MM can never seem to remember her router's default access settings so it'd always mean I'd have to look 'em up on the net real quick and drive over and fix it. (They're less than a minute from my house by Z so it's kind of a LOT easier than talking her thru it on the phone)

Anyway, after the router would do that a few times (varying amount of times per router, and no set pattern or frequency to the problem) it'd die it's final death and you couldn't access it with default settings or reset it.

Three routers, three very different routers; same problem.

Her hubby's PC does weird stuff at times too, but I put that down to a PEBCAK. Me and her husband are good friends and I like him, but he's not the best with a PC. He's gotten better, but his wife is the geek wanna-be in the family and has a much better aptitude for it.

But I got to thinking maybe it's being caused by a brown down on the circuit? I know her hubby uses the same circuit for his guitar/amp/pedals and I figure maybe the draw does something bad? It'd explain some of his PC's wonkiness as well as their router problem.

I figure to test for that should be easy, get one of them off the circuit and see if the problems go away. It'll be hard to talk Mike out of moving his band equipment out of the bedroom, but I will NOT be re-cabling their LAN and moving his system! ;)

Then I had this really weird thought outside and it was sort of like a thunderbolt to me.

Mike is really into his guitar, he's been playing in bands for years and is disgustingly good. I just remembered him mentioning to me about his old Fender amp he still has and loves because "it still packs more power and is more solid than todays junk".

Then I got this weird mental image of their router sitting on that odd looking end table thing in their bedroom, this odd looking end table thing that had leads running to his guitar and pedals and had a very stylized chrome "Fender" on it....

Keeping your router in close proximity to a large electro-magnet could easily cause it to fail in the way I described earlier, couldn't it? :oops:

I felt really dumb that I've been missing that all this time, but it clicked in my mind and really fit the problem. Could that be it?
 
Keeping your router in close proximity to a large electro-magnet could easily cause it to fail in the way I described earlier, couldn't it? :oops:

Electronic equipment and large magnetics generally don't go together well. Move it a few feet away and see if that helps the next one survive.

You might also want to make sure their PC equipment is on a powerstrip with a filiter. It might be cause by voltage spikes if they have something on their loop like a fridge powering on and off and sending voltage spikes through the power line. Big guitar amps might cause the same kind of problem, so you want to filter the PC equipment and make sure the amps are not on the same strips.
 
Well, yeah. Reminds me of the case of the vapors my wife had when she got to work one day and realized they'd put the new server right on the other side of a very thin wall from a degausser machine they have at the TV station to erase tapes with. :LOL: Happily, she straightened that out on day one, rather than after the heartaches.

Tho having said that, I'm not terribly impressed by "three very different routers", as there is a very good chance they have the same basic guts. . . I think there's typically only two or three router chipset makers that control the large majority of the market. . . so it's quite possible that all three have the same core engine running them.
 
Tube amplifiers draw a lot of current when you first turn them on, and that is very electrically noisy. With the router right on top, I bet it's possible to induce the 12volts you need to get the flash memory chip into "write" mode. I'd like to see a dump of the firmware on the routers to see if it hasn't been corrupted.

Vacuum tube equipment near solid state bad bad news.
 
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