This simple mod is mainly for people who feel that their router is getting a little too hot for comfort or maybe it keeps crashing. Most routers fail because of extreme casing temperatures and others fail because they simply lack ram capacity. If you are not experiencing any of these symptoms, just forget it. It won’t make your internet connection go faster or latency to drop. If you’re feeling a little paranoid about overheating routers etc, continue reading =).

What you’ll need.
- A Linksys WRT54G/GL/GS equivalent router
- An 8cm 12V fan ( you can get if from your casing fan / PSU fan or simply buy it )
- A little soldering and drilling skills.

-Get the router open and have a look at your router!
-Mark the position of the fan and get your drill ready.
-Drill the holes. I’ve added extra vents at the side to ease airflow.

- It ain’t easy to get the holes made for me.. I seldom drill stuff haha. Anyway make sure that you’ve drilled the holes for the screws to secure the fan in place and also for the wires to go through. Don’t bother much about the ugly edges because the fan would be covering it later on.

-Then, solder the fan wires according to the picture above. Alright, I know this isn’t the perfect soldering but bigger is better right? =P As long as it doesn’t touch the other pins.

-Here’s the naked Broadcom BCM5352 processor and ram chips of the router. If you’d like a better performance cooling, you’d be better off slapping on a few heatsinks on the processor, memory chips and the radio chip on top of the active cooling by the fan. I did not have my thermal grease with me so I skipped that step.

Fix everything back together and there you have it, an active cooling system for the Linksys WRT54G/GL/GS. Let’s simply overclock the processor from 200mhz to 250mhz.

No problems at all. Pushing the radio power a little higher wouldn’t hurt this baby either.

If you would like to have some control on the fan speed, just add in a variable resistor in the circuit. Adding a switch would also be nice as the sound from the fan gets quite annoying at times. I’m considering to add some diodes and the switch after a few hours running. You could even add led lights, thermal sensors to adjust the fan speed according to the case temperature.. But well, this is the simplest fool proof method to add a fan to the router. It looks pretty good too!

Its a new year! Time to get busy and gobble down some oranges while pocketing those lovely ang paus.

Gong Xi Fa Cai.

Here’s another contender in the plastic skin protection industry. GadgetShieldz. Its supposed to be “again” the same material used in other brands like InvisbleSh*eld and BestSk*nsEver. However GadgetShieldz promises a lower price compared to the other two brands and after browsing their website, it really does turn out to be cheaper with its free shipping worldwide.

Well, does this product really live up to its ” cheap but same quality as the more expensive brands” standard? Hmm.. yes and no.

YES / PROS

1. GadgetShieldz gives an almost perfect cut on the skin letting very little of the phone surface exposed.

2. GadgetShieldz offers a more variety of skins, ( more than the BSE but rather the same or less than IS). They didn’t have the skin for the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 on the BSE but they did have them on the IS site with a much much higher price.

3. GadgetShieldz comes with free worldwide shipping via courier.

4. Like the others, it does give some scratch protection.

5. It’s reasonably priced.

Here’s how the screen protector look like once it is applied on the screen. Pretty nice almost-perfect cut.

NO/CONS 

1. Some of the skins arrive with a little scratches on them already. One of the review units had a pretty long but fine scratch on it.

2. The skin magically turns black / oil-mark stain if too much pressure is applied on it after some time. I had a few cases of this happening already. Even though I was given the replacement for the skin, this phenomena repeated. Shame on you GadgetShieldz.

Anyway, I was told that this phenomena does not happen on every skin. Probably the batch that I received had some problems during manufacturing.

Left: A new piece of GadgetShieldz. Right: The “oil-stained” GadgetShieldz.

Verdict: The only reason I’m using GadgetShieldz currently is because they have the full body protection for my SE Xperia X1. Otherwise, I’ll rather spend a little more and get the BSE instead. Although that skin costs a little, yes a little only bit more, it would save the hassle of replacing the “oil-stained” skin from GadgetShieldz.  Anyway, if you’d like to get some GadgetShieldz for your devices and keep them scratch free thoughout their lifespan, I’m selling them too here. Oh yes I know that contradicts my sentence above.. but oh well.. as I said, it only happens on some skins and it can be replaced for free.

Thanks to GadgetShieldz for the skins =) .