What about improving the passive cooling of the CPU inside the router? The electronics engineer on 1st page mention number 1 reason for electronics death is heat, but dust is in top 3. So I guess I would look if there are any disassembly videos of my router to figure out whether or not a better heatsink is possible.
More airflow is enough and yes vacuum or blow out dust, but other considerations are new thermal pads or paste.
I've got the D-link 868L. I've replaced the aluminum heatsink with a much bigger one, at least 3 times the cooling area and the result is minimal! Only 3 degrees Celsius better. So yeah, it appears that if an actual improvement is needed I would need to de-solder the metal shielding over the cpu and radios in order to replace the pads/thermal paste beneath it and then solder it back. Or see if I can apply apply heatsinks directly over them without that shielding. Does anyone know why some routers have such shielding and not others?
This is what I ended up doing finally, removing the cpu shield and using an old Pentium heatsink to directly contact the CPU and the other 2 chips (would assume those are the 2 wlans). Temps are down to 70 degrees under full load (TV streaming DLNA, 1 Windows machine playing video from Samba share, youtube running in the background and IPTV playing on 2nd TV) and around 68 under idle (I know, so small difference?!?).