Can someone recommend an excellent wireless router?

CISCO.

Anything from a major maker on which you can run a free, third-party firmware like DWRT.

For personal/home use, I have always had great luck with Linksys wireless routers. They are easy to setup and work pretty well. I have one that has been working flawlessly for about 2 years now.

*Note for commercial environments, I love sonicwall, they make great firewalls and routers, and if you want something really secure you can always opt for one of those. They are pretty easy to setup if you know what your doing.

I always go with Linksys. We have Netgear at work too and that seems to run smoothly. Don’t go for the cheapest solution.

Here is a link to the DD WRT website, with a list of compliant hardware, and the free download link, fora, etc. It is really very useful, and makes a meaningful difference in home/small-office router performance.

@silverfly I agree, I find those cheaper ones end up becoming a headache and you may end up wishing you had paid the extra for something a little more user friendly.

Below $150 you have a huge number of good choices.

At that price, you can also get some goodies like faster wired networking, and the ability to plug a hard drive and/or printer into the router to share among your computers.

I can recommend the Apple Airport Extreme (yes, it works with Windows just as well as Macs).

Apple refurbs have a 1-year warranty,
Refurbished AirPort Extreme Base Station (current generation) $149
Refurbished AirPort Extreme Base Station (previous generation) $129

Careful with the Airports. They are great routers with an intuitive setup, but they won’t work as a PPOE bridge.

What is a PPPOE bridge and when would a home user want one?

If you have a DSL modem that acts like a router, and you want to add a router (not an access point) you can’t have two DHCP services handing out IP addys, so you configure the DSL device to access the Internet as a bridge (so it no longer routes) and you use the wireless router to do the routing. Well for some reason, I can’t get my Airport to do that, but I can get other wireless N routers to do it.

I see. I have done that before, using the phone company’s modem/router as just a modem. But not with an Apple router.

I’ve gone through three Linksys routers and one D-Link. (Two WRT54Gs, one WRT54GR, and a DGL-4300 Gaming Router) in the last two years. Don’t know why, don’t ask. I’ve been trying to figure it out for a long time now, and I put it down to the Universe absolutely hating me.
Anyway I decided to stop buying the “highly recommended/expensive brands” since the whole $500 EVGA super motherboard-turned paper weight fiasco I had, and bought a Trendnet TEW-639GR. Wicked router with some seriously awesome software out of the box especially for opening ports and blocking annoying brothers who like to freeload on my internet that they do nothing to help pay for. Oh and it’s usually available for anywhere between $50 and $70.

Well the only wireless router I’ve ever used was a Linksys and it worked pretty well. The only other wireless router I would trust would be something be Apple.