Recently my father had wifi problems at his house. I thought the smart thermostat had a firmware update that was flawed, resulting in it not staying on the netw

Recently my father had wifi problems at his house. I thought the smart thermostat had a firmware update that was flawed, resulting in it not staying on the network for more than a day. After a few months of this all the other devices started losing their wifi connections too. I replaced the Ubiquiti access point with a router flashed with ddwrt [0], and everything now works fine. Maybe a neighbor's wifi network started overlapping on the channel, but I think it most likely the access point just died. It was mounted where it got sun every morning, maybe the heat cycles accelerated the AP's aging? I bought a parts laptop off ebay to fix the broken hinge on the HP laptop I bought in the summer of 2012. After getting my laptop working, I figured the parts laptop would probably work if I bought a replacement "DC IN Power Jack". Glued the broken hinge back together, bought the jack off ebay, and poof "now I have two laptops". I put the second one on a network cable and used it as a media server. In recent months I've basically stopped using this laptop because the wifi is so unreliable. The donor laptop's wifi seems to be unreliable too. My 2012-2014 era Toshiba laptop usually works, but every so often its wifi craps out on me too. What's your experience with aging WiFi chips? The problem with trying to fix things is if you don't have the experience, tools, aptitude or a collection parts, fixing something is often a mission-impossible. It's usually easier to throw out the "broken laptop", when all the device actually needs is a replaceable part. (I'm going to ifixit to look at the repairability score before buying another laptop.) [0] https://openwrt.org/meta/infobox/broadcom_wifi https://openwrt.org/meta/infobox/broadcom_wifi - bought the router at a thrift store for $2, on account of it being listed as supported by ddwrt. ddwrt uses proprietary drivers and supports some routers with broadcom chips.