Did I just brick a TP-Link Touch P5 router in 5 minutes flat?

[Sqwertz]

Got a bunch of good stuff from neighbor across who was downsizing
and moving. The State of Texas apparently gives her pretty good
computer equipment for a system analyst working from home.

Toy #4 on the list was the above router. Supposedly "beamforming"
such is my adapter, so we'll see if there's any improvement.

I botted it a cvouple times VUA wall power and power wwirtch, so it
was booting in router mode just fine (but complained about teh WAN
port not plugged in). And booted it again after the factory reset,
set a new admin password, and went directly into repeater mode just
to give it a whirl before I try and replace the Google fiber router
with this.

According to the manual, it will immediately reboot into repeater
mode and will launch the quick setup for that mode. Page 66.

https://www.manualslib.com/manual/963690/Tp-Link-Touch-P5-Ac1900.html?page=67#manual

It doesn't finish rebooting. There are 50 increments in the boot
progress bar. The first 40 take 1 second each, and the last 10 take
3 seconds each and then sits there for up to 3 hours. Previously it
booted in 20-25 seconds and the last half of the progress bar took
2-3 seconds. I think its brain dead. I It bricked itself! I never
even attached it to any computer or network cable, except after it
was bricked I tried this:

https://www.tp-link.com/us/support/faq/1482/

Nope. I can ping it, though. Is that probably just a hardware
reflex rather than software? Because I apparently blew away the
little web server stub AND that factory reset button as well. Or
rather it committed suicide - It probably saw the graveyard of baby
blue boxes (TP-Link) at the bottom of the bookshelf. This makes
TP-Link #4 of #4 to crash and burn in the last year. Nothing lasted
more than 3 weeks.

Anybody got any bright ideas?

Bummer. I could have used this. And it's so "stylish" <heh>. Even
for a brick.

Next on the list, toy #5 is a Nvidia GTX 1080 that looks brand new.
Came in clamshell, no dust in the fan, still has the plastic peel
off covering over it, and the card connector still had the rubber
bumper cover on it. By far the best video card I will ever have had
by a factor of 10X. Toy #3 was an Asus 4K 28" 1ms monitor. Ouch. I
don't know why the Teacher's Retirement System of Texas needs this
high end stuff while the teachers get paid dirt <shrug>.

-sw