Where I live, firmly in the home counties, we have a pretty crap electricity supply.  It is prone to cutting out unexpectedly.  This afternoon was one such occasion, and when the power came back my router (a Netgear model, slightly old now) had bust.  No amount of power cycling or hard resetting would bring it back to life.

So, it was off to PC World for a replacement.  I plumped for a Netgear DGND3300 dual band router-modem.  It was pretty trivial to set up with my ISP account.  But no matter how hard I tried, I was unable to set up fixed IP addresses for the various bits of kit I attach to the router.  A bit of googling led to the solution: it seems as though this problem is associated with the most up-to-date firmware for the router (which of course it had).  I obtained an older version, downloaded it and flashed it to the router. Problem solved. Except how come my power supply company is so rubbish they let my power cut out so destructively?  And how come Netgear can't properly test their firmware?  For the record, the latest firmware is 2.1.00.48 but the version that works is 2.1.00.42.