When my internet seems to be down but other ports seem to be up.

Now... when you say directly connected, do you mean to the modem or via ethernet to the lan side of the router?

Here is something you can do to see which connection is going down:

I'm assuming you have windows, as I know nothing about Macs.

Open a command prompt: start > run > type 'command'
At the cursor, type 'ping 192.168.1.1 -t' and hit enter
this should run a continuous ping to your router, you should be receiving replies while you have an active connection. Leave this window open.

Open another command prompt
At the cursor, type 'ping www.yahoo.com -t' and hit enter
this should run a continuous ping to yahoo.com, thus verifying your internet connection. Leave this window open.

If your connection to the internet drops, check both of these. If the first one is timing out, you do not have a connection to your router. If the second one is timing out, but not the first one, your internet connection went down(or connection between the modem and router).

Does that help any?

sorta I never thought of doing that but thats a good diagnostic for this. thanks

When it went down the pings to the router timed out. Is there a problem with the router?

It doesn't mean your router is bad definitively, but it does mean that your connection to the router dropped. If all you had to do was powercycle the router to bring it back up, the port you are connected to may have gone bad.

Try switching to another port and testing again.

If the same results come up, try upgrading the software on the router. You can find upgraded firmware for your device at www.linksys.com.

If the connection is still dropping, possibly try another ethernet cable, then as a last resort, if you have another computer available for testing, try it.

Once you have gone through all of this, I would call the router bad. Basically, what we are doing is changing one variable at a time until we find where the problem is, in essence - troubleshooting

The router is wireless. When the wireless is down the eth ports still work. This dropping happens on all of the computers at the same time. I upgraded the firmware two weeks ago.