I have a linksys wrt150 router that connects a laptop (vista) wireless, a desktop (xp) hardwired (cat5), and a game system wireless (wii) together and to the internet... Last Friday we painted the room that has all the cable, phone, satellite, and internet connections coming into the house... We unhooked everything and it stayed unhooked for 2 days... When we hooked everything back up I had lost internet connection... I called the cable company the tech diagnosed it as a router problem because we could get a connection on either computer hooked strait to the modem... I called the tech support for linksys and he told me "that is old very old router" and that " it made in 2007" I was like what year is it now in India? Anyway... He told me I needed to upgrade my router to the wrt300 or I could download something for 39.99 to fix it. The router is barley 1 yr old but is out of warranty.
I have the money to buy a new router but am I going to have to have to pay for a new one every year or is there a fix for mine? What would you do?

If yours is a year old and they said it was "very old" then I have been using a LinkSys router since the mountains sprang up out of the earth and dust was invented. Mine is over five years old and I still have no troubles with it. I keep the firmware updated with the free downloads.

First connect one of your PC's to your Cable/DSL modem and run an IPCONFIG /ALL and write down the DNS server addresses. You will want these for your router configuration.

Lets start with one computer and your router. Make sure you computer is set to acquire its IP address and DNS information using DHCP. Then locate the reset button on the back of your router and depress it for about 10 seconds. Connect your PC to one of the LAN connection ports.

Open your browser to the default IP address for your router. It is usually 192.168.1.1. Logon to your router using the default admin password. It is usually ADMIN.

Now reconfigure your router to accept its WAN connection using DHCP. Go to your router DHCP configuration and make sure that you enter the DNS addresses that you jotted down earlier. This is the DNS information that your DHCP server will hand out along with the assigned IP address. Save the configuration.

Now, on the PC, perform an IPCONFIG /RENEW and then to verify that you have the new information, IPCONFIG /ALL. You should now see the DNS servers as well. Now your PC will be able to perform name resolution. This is probably where it all got messed up. Your router configuration was not saved for the full two days and you may have lost some of this information.

Once you have verified that you can get on the Internet, go back into your router configuration and set up your basic security.

For the router: change your admin password
For the wireless: add a security key. A Personal WPA key is preferable to WEP. Hide your SSID so that neighbors and drive-bys can not see your station id.

Write all the configuration information down and keep it handy and secured.