[misterd]

Originally Posted by biff

Wireless get's nearly no use. Used maybe a few times a month to transfer about 10MB of data, so I'm not going to miss 802.11n. Stability is far more important.

What are the improvements that the third party firmware provides?

Stability and features.

"Among other features not found in the original Linksys firmware, DD-WRT adds the Kai Daemon for the Kai Console Gaming network, WDS wireless bridging/repeating protocol, Radius Authentication for more secure wireless communication, advanced Quality of Service controls for bandwidth allocation, and software support for the SD-Card hardware modification."

What is DD-WRT? - DD-WRT Wiki has many more listed features such as..

• 13 languages
• 802.1x Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP)
• Access Restrictions
• Ad hoc
• Afterburner
• Client Isolation Mode
• Client Mode (supports multiple connected clients)
• DHCP Forwarder (udhcp)
• DHCP Server (udhcp or Dnsmasq)
• DNS Forwarder (Dnsmasq)
• DMZ
• Dynamic DNS (DynDNS, easyDNS, FreeDNS, No-IP, TZO, ZoneEdit, custom, and others)
• Hotspot Portal (Sputnik Agent ,Chillispot)
• IPv6
• JFFS2 (JFFS2)
• MMC/SD Card Support (hardware modification required)
• NTP
• ntop Remote Statistic (ntop)
• OpenVPN Client & Server (only in -vpn build of the firmware)
• Port Triggering
• Port Forwarding
• PPTP VPN Server & Client
• QoS Bandwidth Management
• QoS L7 Packet Classifier (l7-filter)
• RFlow
• Routing (BIRD)
• Samba FS Automount
• Syslog
• Rx Antenna
• Tx Antenna
• Show Status of Wireless Clients and WDS with System Uptime/Processor Utilization
• Site Survey
• SNMP
• SSH server & client (dropbear)
• Startup, Firewall, and Shutdown scripts (startup script)
• Static DHCP
• Style (Changeable GUI; v.23)
• Supports New Devices (WRT54G V3, V3.1, V4, V5 and WRT54GS V2.1, V3, V4)
• Telnet server & client
• Transmit Power Adjustment (0-251mW, default is 28mW, 100mW is safe)
• UPnP
• USB
• VLAN
• WOL (Wake On Lan) (WOL)
• WDS Connection Watchdog
• WDS Repeater Mode
• Wireless MAC Address Cloning
• Wireless MAC Filter
• WMM (Wi-Fi MultiMedia)
• WPA over WDS
• WPA/TKIP with AES
• WPA2
• Xbox Kaid (Kai Engine)

I should let you read the rest

Anyways, it's been a god send in regards to stability. It used to be days and needing to reboot cause it hung up or got slow, this has been several months without issues and still going strong.