Netgear D7000 v1 solved my disconnections/crashes

[wasyl00]

Just wanted to chip in for those who are struggling with strange disconnections and crashes as I was for a quite some time.
So for whatever reason my router was getting strange disconnections where it would just drop the internet without any reason or stopped providing WiFi or sometimes just sing become unresponsive. It was giving me headache but all it was needed to fix was power cycle and the problem was going away. I was dealing with as it was only once every couple of days or week or so. Recently issue started to annoy me to the point that it was crashing every few hours. Probably because I started adding more and more iot devices to the network including automation server etc. I started standard procedure of updating firmware, reset settings, etc. Than I stumbled on the one or two posts saying about differences with cooling solutions between v1 and v2. I also spotted posts people modifying heatsinks of v1. I decided to add more cooling to the router before I start modding the hardware. The simplest test I came up with was to strap the router to laptop cooling fan just to see any change in behaviour. To my surprise all issues went away! As I'm typing this router runs stable for about 90 hours, something I haven't seen in long time.
I'm considering my options if I should go for passive only cooling with massive heatsink covering processor and the memory (btw the current heatsink and the mounting is terrible) or install a usb powered fan on to of it all.

Anyways it's bad that this issue has not been acknowledged as reason of disconnections as I wasted countless hours fiddling with the software side without realising that it was hardware to blame.

[antinode]

> [...] I stumbled on the one or two posts saying about differences with
> cooling solutions between v1 and v2. I also spotted posts people
> modifying heatsinks of v1. [...]

   Thanks for the helpful links.  Possibly interesting:

      https://community.netgear.com/t5/x/x/m-p/1706952
      https://community.netgear.com/t5/x/x/m-p/1838313
      https://community.netgear.com/t5/x/x/m-p/1854219

   Where did anyone (who wasn't confused) suggest doing anything with
the heatsink in a D7000[v1]?  The D7000v2 seems to be the one with the
badly attached heatsink.  The heatsinks in my two D7000[v1] units look
fine to me.

   My experience with the D7000[v1] is that it hangs after about a
month, long after it's reached thermal equilibrium.  I've concluded that
the firmware, not the hardware is the cause of the problem which bothers
me.

[wasyl00]

I understand your frustration and also the fact that your problem may be different. I do not claim that thermal issue is the cause of all problems with this router.

If you look at the differences in the cooling solutions you will see that they improved it with V2. Where a piece of aluminium sheet has been replaced by set of proper heatsinks. This is telling me that they discovered that this thing needs more cooling. Furthermore the heatsink on the V1 is not well designed. The way those mounting clamps are positioned is not great. It even needs piece of foam to prop the thing in one corner to even sit (flat?) on the cpu. Another issue I see is that funnny piece of porous looking thing on the memory does not even look like exchanging any heat at all. It may lead to issue overtime as the below is suggesting.

https://community.netgear.com/t5/DSL-Modems-Routers/D7000-Freeze-Lock-up/m-p/1383453/highlight/true#... 

You mentioned thermal equilibrium. I think you should consider factors such as ambient temperature and variable load. My router definitely started to crash more the more clients I added. Again I'm just speaking about my experience.

If I had crashes every 4 weeks I would consider installing simple router rebooter. I know its a workaround but probably better that resetting router yourself.  All you need is D1mini and a small relay module.