I know it's an OLD topic but in case anyone's looking: one of the things I do regularly is talk to my IP folks and ask them, NICELY, to update my FIRMWARE over their modem lines. YES, they can do that!! Not all the support folks know that so if the first person you get knows it, say thank you and call again. Eventually you'll find someone that'll know how to do that. You'll have to do a full reboot of your modem AND your router, then turn off your computer or laptop so that everything gets reconfigured in your BIOS as well BUT everything should be running smoothly after that. I say this because I have a RTW54G router and my son gave it to me after it had been in storage for over 7 yrs or so. Needless to say, we didn't know if it would even work. It did, for a while, but it was SO sluggish! After a round or MANY with support from my IP provider, and working w/ my son, I finally found that famed guy that updated its firmware and suddenly EVERYTHING was running smoothly.
Other than that, keep your computers running clean, I'd suggest: AVAST as an av; Spybot S&D; Malwarebytes, the free version run about once a wk; and if you run into any probs, keep an eye out at Tom's Hardware for hints on how to fix things.
Oh, and I'm here 'cause I can't seem to access my router pages. I'll start a thread for that though.