Hi, I have a Hawking HWR54G wireless router. It used to work fine, but now it is giving me trouble. When I hook it up to my cable modem, and plug my desktop into one of the ports, everything works, ie. desktop (through ethernet) and wireless laptop. After maybe 30 mins the connection on both die, so I have to unplug the router and plug the cable modem directly into my NIC on my desktop, reset the modem, and it reconnects (without using the router)
Does anyone know if this sounds like a router on the verge of dieing?

i would try another router.
have you done a factory reset on the router?
did you look in the routers firmware, log page to see the problem?
my router got a smurf attack last week.
i never heard of that attack before.
google has lotsa info on the mess.

When you said you lost connection on both computers, was there LAN connection or Internet connection? Was that you could still ping other computer but but just couldn't go to Internet? If you still have access in home network, would recommend you to log on to router management page and check its WAN (Internet), LAN and other network status and see what's actually went wrong.

Also you can check on the router manufacturer's website for new firmware, download and install it.

Hope helps..