R6400/AC1750 randomly disconnecting

DexterJB

I think it's out of warantee.

Though, I have found some interesting things.

I just disabled the 2.5G band for a while and used a separate router to do it's work. All the heavy lifting on the netgear: chromecast speakers, chromecast and the laptops. The router never crashed. Having flashed netgear firmware several times, I decided to try one of the open source ones to see if I could regain full function of both (or three?) radios. Success! I have devices across both radios and nothing bad happens. Importantly (to me), my laptop is hanging out on the 2.5 band and it's not crashing like before! On tomato the router stops making the screaming noises when the demands on the network shifted (e.g., when I started streaming) like it did on the oem firmware too... huh...

But then I switch to the 5Ghz band. Crash! Immediately. Rather than being stuck in a boot loop, it attempts to re-boot like before and then, failing, literally powers itself off. I can power it back on no problem and the rest of the devices work on the network fine. Laptop & evertthing works fine on 2.5, then I switch to 5 and predictably it crashes again.

So I'm thinking it's been the laptop all along... or something about it stressing the router. Other laptops aren't doing it. It's a microsoft surface pro 4, all drivers up to date 

Would you have any idea what's possibly going wrong here? Settings I may be able to tinker with on the router and/or the laptop?