> Speaking of... does anyone know how to speed up wifi router boot time? Stupid thing takes 5 minutes almost.

This is probably due to the access point having minimal hardware for the task, and it's startup not being particularly well optimised, so "buy a better AP/router" use likely the most practical answer.

As an alternative, you could buy a small device (perhaps a recent rPi model) with more umph (or add this task to an existing machine in your home lab setup), give it a wireless NIC if it doesn't already have one, and run hostapd to turn it into an AP. That might startup a lot faster.