Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I bought this from a local retailer in February. I had another Netgear Router that had been recommended by a friend that worked flawlessly for 5 years, and then started to not work so great. I figured it was just time to replace it - it gets used hard, and Netgear was no longer supporting the old router I had. I was told this was a comparable model to the one I was replacing. Set-up was easy and I was online quickly, but the good times were short lived. From day one, about 8 hours out of the box, it began dropping our connection. Sometimes once a day, sometimes every few hours. Sometimes it would come back on after a brief pause, and other times it would require me to pull the power and wait for a reset that way. It was frustrating, and I was told over and over by Netgear that it was my modem. I had my cable company come out and check, and told me there was nothing wrong with the modem or my line. Then I was told it was the cables I had. I replaced all of them. I finally gave up and resigned myself to the fact that this was normal. Two weeks ago it suddenly got worse. I contacted Netgear again, and I was told I was out of the warranty period (despite my complaining early on) and they wanted $75 for tech support. I refused. I got some e-mail support, but it was to update my firmware, however the directions they sent me did not match their own user interface that was on my computer. They were asking me to click on buttons and tabs that simply weren't there. While trying to update the firmware, Netgear downloaded "Netgear Genie" on my computer. Things went from worse to incredibly bad right then and there. I couldn't stay online for more than 5 minutes. It was perpetually asking me to login, and rejecting my password (yet it was shown right on the screen as my password). It kept saying that wifi was not working but couldn't tell me why. I finally gave up in complete and total frustration last night. I went to the store and bought a Belkin router. Setup was easy, and I was online in about 15 minutes. I haven't had one dropped signal since. I got another response from Netgear support asking me to do a plethora of things, and I responded back that they lost a longtime customer as I could no longer deal with the constant drops, and a google search of that router model yielded thousands of complaints identical to mine. I told them I bought a Belkin router and my Netgear days were done. Their response? Sorry you felt you had to do that. If we can be of further help, let us know. Gee...thanks. I blew $50 on a router that never worked right from day one, poor customer service from day one, and nothing but headaches. I never had an issue with poor signal in the house - I always had 5 bars - but if you can't stay connected, then what's the use? Also beware of the Netgear forums. As another reviewer noted, there's a guy that trawls the forums and responds to pretty much everything with terse replies and references to follow links on his sig line with little other help. He has "Netgear Fanatic" under his username. He's useless, and unfriendly.