re: Do Wifi routers "wear out" over time?

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Never seen one with a failed cap? Then tend to bulge, or melt. Typically causing a power to ground short and thus will never turn on.

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Never seen one in a router personally, but I'm sure it happens a lot. There's a cap in my soundbar that pops every so often, I've replaced it a couple times already. Hardware fails all the time. I'm just saying it's not always immediate or catastrophic, and many systems can continue to operate (possibly erratically or in a degraded way) with failed or failing components. The behavior of hardware depends on its physical environment.

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I am starting to believe you write software for a living

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I do write software, but if I did it for a living I'd be dead.

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do not think circuit board failure is the primary reason people chunk routers so quickly these days

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Well, it can't be due to software failure, because software cannot fail! Hear me out.


Software will always operate as written. It may work in a way that was not intended, but it will 100% of the time work as written. So if a given program or set of programs no longer operates a device like it used to (after a full wipe and reinstall), then there are really only two basic reasons this can happen:

1. The inputs have changed somewhat permanently (this includes things like a different set of other devices interacting with the software, different settings, cached data used as input not cleared, etc)

2. The hardware has changed, or the way the hardware functions has changed


So whenever a system behaves erratically and you can eliminate #1, that only leaves #2 as the cause.