In today's upgrade, the wireless access point that we have upstairs and which most of our computers, tablets, and the like connect to has become increasingly crochety with old age. I frequently have to reboot the beast to get it to deign to provide Internet service. This, of course, is unacceptable under our Household Service-level Agreement -- which pretty much consists of "Daddy! Make it work!"
The obvious solution was to replace the wireless access point. I had noticed while browsing the Micro Center website that they had a suitable WAP device. Of course, I had driven down there enough times by now. Oh, look! The same device is available on Amazon with Prime delivery and for the same price.
And then I stopped to think about it. The WAP was actually an older generation of equipment. If I ever do get fiber-level service here, it doesn't even have a fast wired network connection to run over the network wire to the router in the basement. It would be a shame to buy this beast and then have to replace it.
More browsing followed. Oh, look! Here is a router from the same manufacturer as my current fancy router. It is just as fast as my current router. It just lacks the fancy touchscreen interface. And it is not actually very expensive, as it is only twice the price of the WAP that I am looking at. It can be configured as a WAP and provide redundancy in case the router in the basement decides to fail, because I can pull it out of service, carry it downstairs, and reconfigure it as a router.
And I can have it delivered the next day at no additional charge.
So I bought a router. It arrived today. Configuration was a bit more annoying than it had to be, mostly because I didn't want to fiddle with plugging my desktop computer into it directly, so the initial configuration was done via my cellphone and a wireless connection, at least until I could get the router functions neutered and the new router onto the network as a WAP. But a few hiccups later, we ended up with a nice new WAP.
I think I will stop buying hardware for a while now. :)