The greatest peice of communications hardware I ever bought was my US Robotic Courier modem that I purchased around 15 year ago. Until now.

 About a week ago I bought a Linksys WRT54G for around £30 - including delivery. A deal, a steal. It's a router that's been around for a while and I've seen it in many homes and small businesses while running around doing tech support. So what's so special? Writable flash? Nice Colours? Bright Lights? Open platform hardware? Cheap Price? No. Available Open Source Router Software. Thanks go to lifehacker.com [1] for the original article.

I had my fingers crossed hoping it wasn't a version 7 router - according to the DD-WRT router software's website [2], v7 isn't support. Fortunately I saw a nice little 'v5' on the bottom of my router when it arrived.

Then, yesterday, after spending 3 days traumatising myself reading about how I will 'brick' my router into a £30 paperweight if I do this wrong, I wrote the necessary files to the router, while sweating away into the buckets I had procured for the occasion.

Thanks must also go to scorpiontek [3] for preparing a step-by-step tutorial for upgrading the v5 specifically. They made it so easy that even someone who uses Vista voluntarily should manage it ok.

I now have a £30 router with enterprise features (WDS), ridiculous and unnecessary levels of wireless security, UPNP, QoS (packet, MAC and port based) and several methods of firewalling and routing ports in any way I want.

To honest, it's overkill. But so what? I may be born in the UK but there's a little American inside me that wants a 4 litre car, high octane fuel, a RAID array in my loft, a powerlifting gym in my basement, a helicopter to reach my country retreat... and a £30 router with more features and an enterprise Cisco.

Wow... I feel like like emoting my self satisfaction while two words escape my lips... "Denny Crane."