DD-WRT Flash Guide

Do you ever get fed up with your router? Find it's limited, not letting you do what you really want? Or even worse you need to "fix" it all the time by switching it on and off. Thats crazy, and certainly not what we expect when we pay for the router.

But don't worry, there is a solution. Most of the home routers you can buy are more than powerful enough in terms of hardware and chipset they use, it's just the flaky badly designed software they come shipped with that lets them down. Thats where DD-WRT (http://www.dd-wrt.com) comes in, you can turn a cheap £30 router into a powerful enterprise level router, packed full of features. Best of all, its fast, well written and will stop the annoyance of having to reboot every time the WiFi goes down! Oh, and its free!

If you want to check if your router supports DD-WRT or you're buying a new one, head over to and look under the supported hardware section.

I've created two DD-WRT Tutorials here; a quick guide for advanced users and in in depth guide for beginners. Both tutorials are for Windows XP or Vista, but can easily be translated to Windows 7 or Linux.

I've used the Buffalo WHR-G300N router for the DD-WRT Guides. It's the perfect example of a cheap (I picked mine up new for £30 at Aria - http://www.aria.co.uk) router with fairly average performance that can be completely transformed into an immensely powerful piece of kit with DD-WRT. Also the Buffalo routers have, annoyingly, encrypted firmware. So while a lot of router can be flashed with DD-WRT from the web GUI front end, the WHR-G300N (and the other Buffalo models) need to be hacked using the Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) the first time you flash. It's pretty easy, but its probably the hardest way to flash with DD-WRT, hence the tutorials. It shouldn't take more than 30 minutes.

Did you enjoy this? If so, please spread the word: