Well, if you can't get a laugh off a new guy..Who can you? What a day I tell you. Let me start by giving you the back story on this Netgear router. It served it's purpose for about a year as the main router on my network before being replaced. It was moved to the front of the house and DHCP was disabled in order to have it act as a simple switch / wireless access point. An ethernet cable was run through the walls from my bedroom, where the cable modem and newer router are, to the den where the old router become the AP. This particular router started having problems about 6 months ago. Really all it did would loose wireless connectivity resulting in me having to unplug and sometimes reset the device. I figured it would just die at some point. I was never expecting the blasted thing to literally blow up. So I get a call today that no one on that side of the house could get connected and also that the PS3 was not displaying. I came home to check it out only to find that the router was completely dead as was the PS3. I opened up the router to find that the center section of one of the chips had been shot off. After tallying the damages I went to purchase another PS3. I get home and set it up... But no display... WTF? After some playing around I found out that the HDMI port on the TV also went out. Damnit. So after getting the PS3 up and running I hooked up an ethernet cable to the wall where it would be hooked into my bedroom router directly.. No connectivity... Damnit it again! Turns out that it had also blown out some ports on the good router in my room. That's all the damage I could find for now. There was no tripped surge protector, breaker, or storm or brown out to blame. Rest of the house was perfectly fine. My theory is that the router in question simply went bad. Anything that was connected to it via ethernet (PS3 and bedroom router) got the blunt end of it. The PS3 some how let it jump from ethernet to HDMI where the port on the TV was blown out. Pic of that router is below. And is there anyway to salvage the save data on my original PS3s hard drive?
That looks like it is (or was, for it has ceased to be) a WGT-624 with an Atheros chipset. Not sure what the burst chip is, though. Somehow, I doubt it managed to cause all that damage on it's own - it could still have been a voltage spike that was responsible, especially if your surge protectors are old-ish, or your power supplies have been iffy in the past (surge protectors eventually wear out). I feel your pain, though - sucks to lose all that equipment in one go... :-( Edit: I think the exploderated chip was a Marvell LAN switch, which goes some way to explain the damage to the other LAN connected devices.
It's a Netgear WPN624 Rev. 1 and the chip thats blown is indeed a Marvel. No lightning or anything. Just a normal day. The surge protector was old and I bought a much nicer one today just in case.
You might want to consider looking at plugging your expensive stuff into a small office level UPS - they're pretty good at protecting equipment & some can keep logs of voltage fluctuations over a given period of time. Can be useful to see if you're getting spikes/brownouts that you might not notice until something pops. Any chance you can get stuff fixed/replaced via your home insurance?
I'm going to return it.. One of the kick ass things about buying your consoles from Sam's club is that you have a full year to return it for any reason. Insurance has a $500 deductable so I can't do it.. It's no big deal really. It gives me an excuse to get a Buffalo router now and the TV had 2 more HDMI ports luckily.
