I have a netgear 1100 and yes the driver is most recent. Operating system is windows 8 and it's freshly installed, had these same problems with windows 7. It just randomly stops working, or works intermittently. Things will load or stream intermittently on the web, or the driver will blatantly stop working after a time. Reinserting the adapter will fix the issue. After even more time, reinserting the adapter doesn't even work since the computer no longer recognizes that the adapter is taken out or put back in for whatever reason.

I've always known that the problem is the netgear driver software that netgear insists run in the background. When I have this program disabled on startup, everything is fine, until after a couple days (and I've had this happen on two separate, freshly installed operating systems) the RAM will go up to 90 percent load, and the computer just freaks out and upon restarting the computer, the little wifi bar thing that usually appears is gone, and the network doesn't work at all, but then I'll turn on that damned netgear program (either the smart wizard or just the simple notifier) and it works.

I've tried googling the problem to no avail.

To answer your overall question, yes, I have not bought Netgear in a long time due to constant quality issues with their products. There was a reason they were cheaper than everyone else.

For all I know, they may make a good product today, but I tend to stick with products that I don't have issues with.

Good luck on getting your issue resolved.

Incidentally, your issue sounds like it could be a USB issue (and the 1100 is a USB device). I have had the exact same problem with headsets (the main reason I just bought an analog headset).

I tend to avoid them and D-Link as well. Linksys used to be my go to brand until 3com bought them up. Now it's Asus. Asus' last few routers have been wonderful.

I stopped buying netgear after the last netgear router I bought lasted a whopping 6 months.

Its a very common problem that no one answer seems to solve. If you do a search on USB stops working randomly, you can find a plethora of people that have your exact symptoms but with a variety of different USB devices. It has happened to me on multiple PCs with multiple different headsets... yet my mouse and keyboard are always fine.

https://www.google.com/search?q=usb+devices+stop+working+randomly yields 994,000 results.

My theory is that it is a chipset issue (where the USB functions are stored on the motherboard) but it also seems that if this were the case, it would have been fixed a long time ago.