WRT54GL Router – How to Fix Constant Crashing

My first thought is a heat problem, since the games you referred to as not causing the problem are all lightweight. Try using a utility like HWMonitor (free) to keep an eye on the system temperature when you're playing such games. An overheat could cause a lockup or an unexpected reboot.

Another (less likely) possibility, particularly considering that it sounds like the machine is fairly old, is that the power supply is going out. Your power consumption could be going high and resulting in voltage sags, which could cause freezeup or reboots.

I have a D-Link and have had similar issues. Once in a while (used to be once a week on average) the router would suffer a crash in its wireless stack. This can be easily verified: you cannot browse to the router's admin site - it's down. But if you connect a laptop to an ethernet plug on the router, you can surf.

If you look at the D-Link forums for the 655 and 825 models, you'll find dozens of complaints. D-Link ignored this for several months and the started to try addressing it by a series of firmwares. In the case of the 825 they even came out with a B-model that fixes most problems (not that it helped anyone who had the A already).

The latest release seems to do the trick for me: I now average about a month between crashes. What seems to exacerbate the crashes is downloading large quantities of data, particularly if you use BitTorrent. The higher the download speed, the higher the chance of a failure.

So, upgrade to the latest firmware, avoid going over 500Mb/s downloads and you should be fine. Alternatively, do what other people on the forums suggest and ditch the D-Link.