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Thisjustin5's avatar
Thisjustin5
Aspirant
Nov 12, 2020

R7800 restarts

Nitehawk x4s R7800 frequently restarts. It will lose connection wired and wireless, power light goes amber, and it will boot up and connect without me doing a thing. I've read thru old, closed post....
Firmware
Hardware
Troubleshooting
JayboH's avatar
JayboH
Apprentice
Nov 13, 2020

Did this start after upgrading to .76?

Thisjustin5's avatar
Thisjustin5
Aspirant
Nov 13, 2020
It's been happening for months and becoming more frequent. I'm not sure if it started w/ the .76 firmware I thought the modem/service was the problem only became aware of the router issue in the last month or so.
I rolled back to .46 firmware which was recommended and it was fine for a week or so then same thing.
    • JayboH's avatar
      JayboH
      Apprentice
      Nov 26, 2020

      Ok so awhile back what I did was factory reset by holding a toothpick in the reset button for half a minute just to be extra sure.  When it asks you to update to the latest firmware (.76) I said yes.

       

      Now here's the kicker:  do NOT restore your saved settings.  Put them in manually one by one.

       

      I haven't had any issues at all now.  You can see my past posts that .76 was giving me lots of problems until I did this (I discussed it in several threads, not just this one.)

      • Greygamer's avatar
        Greygamer
        Aspirant
        Dec 25, 2020

        Problem: 2-yr old R7800 router randomly reboots every 3-5 hours.
        Solution: Replace the factory power supply (12V 3.5A) with a PWR+ Model PWR-TAJ120500 (12V 5.0A).


        Starting around Thanksgiving, my Netgear R7800 router started to randomly restart.

        As December wore on, the reboots occurred more and more frequently, eventually reaching once every 3 hours.
        That's at least two restarts every workday.

         

        The firmware had NOT been updated, so it wasn't a botched update that caused the problem.

         

        Without the router loading the power supply, the original power supply measured 12.27V with 20mVrms ripple.
        12.27V is a bit far from the 12V target, but not quite enough to say there's obviously a problem.
        If it had been low by the same amount, say 11.73V, the need to replace the supply would have been more obvious because the voltage usually sags under load.

         

        However, I've noticed that a poor power supply is a frequent hardware cause for flaky PCs, and took a gamble that the power supply was to blame.

         

        Several advantages of the PWR-TAJ120500 over the original and other replacement power supplies are:

        1. Braided/foil shield on the power cable with a ferrite bead at the router connector filters out electrical noise picked up by the long power cable.
        2. More current (5A) available if the original power supply wore out because it was slightly underpowered for the R7800
        3. Laptop-style brick + power cord means the plug only takes one spot on an outlet strip
          I should point out that Netgear's clever original supply is a slim and tall rectangle designed to plug in sideways, so it also would only take one spot, but most replacement supplies do not follow Netgear's design.
        4. U.S. company, with the power supply manufactured in Taiwan.

         

        After installing the new supply, there have been no restarts for over a week. Problem solved!

        For the curious, the PWR-TAJ120500 measured 12.14V with 15mV of ripple without the router connected. A lot less noisy, and closer to 12V.