📶 Router keeps randomly disconnecting every few hours, tried most of the usual fixes already

Our home wifi router has developed this specific habit over the past month or so of just randomly dropping the connection entirely every few hours, no clear pattern I can actually identify in terms of specific time of day or even which particular devices happen to be connected and active at that exact moment it decides to drop out on us. Restarting it manually always fixes it immediately, but obviously that is not remotely a genuine sustainable fix if it keeps happening this frequently and unpredictably throughout each day going forward indefinitely. Tried updating the actual firmware first through the router's own admin settings page, which did not seem to change anything meaningfully afterward despite completing successfully without any actual errors during that specific update process itself. Checked with our internet provider directly too, and they ran a fairly basic remote line test on their end and said everything looked genuinely fine from their specific side of things, which either means the actual issue is specifically with the router hardware itself, or possibly some kind of interference happening locally in our own home that their remote test simply cannot properly detect or diagnose from their end. The router itself is close to four years old now, which a tech savvy friend mentioned might genuinely just be reaching the natural end of its reasonably expected working lifespan regardless of any specific software fix I might try applying to it at this point going forward. That would obviously mean simply replacing it entirely rather than continuing to troubleshoot something that might just be normal hardware wear at this point in its life. Before actually spending money on a brand new router though, wanted to check if there are any other less obvious specific things actually worth trying first, changing the wifi channel manually, adjusting the specific broadcast frequency band being used, anything else that has genuinely worked for other people dealing with this exact kind of frustrating and unpredictable random disconnection issue themselves recently. Has anyone successfully fixed this exact kind of intermittent dropping issue without simply replacing the entire router outright, or does this specific symptom usually mean it is genuinely time to just get a new one instead at this point?

Mine lasted almost seven years before finally showing similar symptoms, so four years actually sounds fairly early for a router to start failing unless it was a cheaper budget model from the start. Worth checking if yours ever overheated regularly in a closed cabinet or shelf, that alone shortened the lifespan on a previous router of mine considerably faster than expected.

Switching from the automatic band selection to manually forcing the 5GHz band only stopped my own random drops almost entirely about a year ago, turned out our router kept switching bands inconsistently whenever a neighbor's wifi network got busy on the exact same channel nearby. Worth trying that specific manual override for a week or two before spending any real money on a brand new router.

Went through the exact same clean line test result from my own ISP a few months back before finally just replacing the router anyway out of sheer frustration, and the random drops stopped completely within days of installing the new one. Sometimes the provider's remote diagnostics genuinely cannot catch hardware degradation happening slowly inside an aging router itself, even when everything on paper still looks perfectly fine from their side.