Sorry about that, Ive had a lot going on this week, I was here earlier today, and ended up getting distracted with work. I really do appreciate you putting in this much effort to help, offering to load my config seems huge.
After reading your post and pm, I decided to start from scratch(it was needed anyway), I disconnected my router and switches, ive got 3 Dlink DGS-2208 switches connected now, one in my living room connected to a htpc, ps3, xbox360 and two in this room connecting a few pc's, another 360, 3 Nas drives, a printer, and some misc devices.
Im not a big fan of wireless, but there are a couple of ipod's, a wii and a few laptops that connect using wireless G.
Ive labeled the cables on each end and ran everything neatly to avoid any confusion. The only connections at the router are the switches and the modem, and i setup the two switches in this room so that all my important devices were on one and the stuff i can live without on another. I figured that this way, i could easily swap out one router for another and, if need be, just connect one switch for testing.
This all went fine, I reset the modem to factory settings, and made the basic security changes to get up and running. I planned to take my time reserving dhcp addy's and to group them by device catagory; desktop, storage, etc. and eventually to go through the list making everything I could static, as you advised.
This all seemed to be going fine, I didnt have any connection issues to speak of, spent some time on xbox live and the only thing i noticed is that Halo: Reach listed my upload speed in the red but Ive seen that with both routers and my isp kind of sucks.
I went back later to add more reserved ip's, got 7 or 8 done and found that i had devices connected that werent showing up in the device list, the xbox in the living room was powered down, the other one was up and i could see if from my pc but the router didnt show it as connected(both xbox's have unique Host names and i hadnt done anything with the gamefuel setup).
Then the ps3 didnt show up in the list when it was powered on. My wife and a friend were watching tv in the living room and i didnt want to bother them again so i didnt flip over to it to check its connection. The htpc is on the same switch, i could still get into if from this room and see it in the device list in the router so i knew the switch was working and connected. At some point during this i lost my internet connection and at first just assumed it was the damn cable company again and stayed focused on the local network.
I worked my way through the routers menu's, couldnt find anything that stood out and several hard and soft reboots hadnt helped. i had copied and pasted the reserved ip's to a txt file and was getting pretty frustrated so i started deleting devices and disconnecting them thinking that maybe i had hit some kind of limit to either the amount of connections or the number of reserved dhcp ip's.
This didnt help and was getting a little irate so i decided to make sure i could get online and quit for a while, but i couldnt.
I ran it through quite a few hard reboots, noticing different problems each time, sometimes i could ping websites from the router, other times i couldn't, sometimes my pc's would obtain dns server info, sometimes they wouldnt, although i was never able to load a webpage.
I tried unplugging the modem and router and leaving them that way for a while but it didnt make a difference so I did a full factory reset and still couldnt connect with only this pc on to the router. The connection was great if i bypassed the router and connected directly to the modem with this pc so i brought my company laptop in and it was fine aswell (different mac address).
This was my limit, so I switched to my linksys router, i did have issues getting it connected but to be honest, id done so much, my memorys pretty blurred, it did eventually connect and has worked since, even with connecting all of my devices and reserving ip's.
Ive already RMA'ed the 4500 for a refund and ive calmed down so ive been looking around for a replacement but theres not much of a selection and nothing that seems to compare feature-wise. i was considering buying a lower model Dlink, but you must be pretty confident in yours if your willing to load my saved config so what do you think? have i missed something? Im definately not an expert when it comes to networking. If you think its worth a try and are willing to continue helping then ill buy another, maybe ill learn something.
sorry, i feel like ive written a book, i didnt plan to get this detailed when i started typing
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