Out with the proprietary, in with the open-source

As you may or may not be aware, many Internet service providers are now imposing monthly bandwidth caps on their customers. Comcast is probably the company responsible for starting this practice on a large scale, and many other ISPs followed suit. You would be hard-pressed to find an ISP that does not do this now. Sadly, my ISP is doing this too. Even worse, my ISP is a small town local business and they have to pay someone else for the utilities, thus their cost of operation is higher, meaning my bandwidth is capped at 15 gigabytes a month. After being billed for approximately 17 gigabytes over the limit last month, I have decided that keeping an eye on my own bandwith would be a great idea.
I headed over to dd-wrt.com to grab myself some a copy of the latest open-source router firmware. Instead of going with the feature-limited proprietary Linksys firmware, which comes with the router, I flashed the dd-wrt firmware onto my Asus WGL-520GU wireless router. Trying to figure out which version I needed was no so easy, but no the less I was able to obtain the correct firmware. Flashing the firmware requires the Asus firmware restore utility, and under Windows 7 or Vista needs to be run as administrator with the firewall disabled.
After flashing the firmware, changing the settings was a simple matter of copy and past from my old router. The dd-wrt firmware has the bandwidth monitoring feature, which was really all that I was after. The feature gives you graphs to show you how much bandwidth you've used in the month and on what days.
If you are like me and you are tired of dealing with limited router firmware, download a version of dd-wrt and try it out because it is free. Before attempting this however, you should read the instructions and be aware that a screw-up can brick your router.