I want to crash my router

SYN Flooding Should do the trick. This works by sending as many SYN packets to the client as possible. "SYN" stands for "Syncronization" and is the message that computers send to each other to initiate a TCP data session (aka - handshake). If you send something like 10,000,000 of these "SYN" messages to a client, the client attempts to respond to every single request and is overwhelmed. Go out to Google and find the "Low Orbit Ion Cannon" and download it. Point it to your router's IP address and watch as it crumbles under the pressure. For best results, use multiple machines with this app simultaneously if possible.

If that doesn't work, Google "Ping of Death". This sends an oversized ICMP packet to the router and causes a buffer overflow, which should crash it assuming that it doesn't have protections against it.

nowhere it tells me how to actually do the ping of death, and loic doesnt seem to do the trick?

LOIC may not work if your router has a firewall enabled. Disable your SPI firewall and see if it works. If not, your router may have built-in protections against that type of attack. If it does, I'd also bet that it has protections against PoD attacks.

so what can i do? this has to be easy so i can demonstrate my "hacking knowledge"   i dont want to have to log into my router conifg page every time i want to mess with it...

but its good to know its protected

Ok well first things first, DDoS'ing your own router in a controlled environment is not "hacking" (I don't even claim to be a hacker and I've done far more technical things than this to a network). Even then, this sort of thing is tedious work and requires a lot of settings modifications, etc. So if you're reluctant to even login to your router to change a setting then I would just quit while you're ahead. If you really want to learn this sort of stuff, there are plenty of resources out there (legitimate and otherwise) that will teach you the ropes. Some carefully-orchestrated Googling is in order.

is it ddos is its only coming from one computer (or do i need to have all of my ~15 computers doing it at once? d=distributed, right?

Yes, DDoS = Distributed Denial of Service

I did mention in my original post that you may need a few computers to make it work (I realize that you may not have access to a bunch of comps which is why this is so hard to do). If you can get two or three systems plugging away at it on your local network it should be enough. Are you using a gigabit network or 100Mbps?

i have at least 4 computers i can use for this (the other 10 i want to leave alone)

the problem with loic is that only a few of the packets gp through (most fail). y?

That may be the router's built-in protections. In a TCP session, when a handshake is sent (SYN), the router should respond with an acknowledgement (ACK). This is the first step in a three part process. If an ACK is not received for every SYN, some of the packets are considered "dropped" even though they reached the client. I can't remember as I've not used LOIC for some time (*cough cough* I mean, what? *cough*), is there an option to send via UDP? This probably isn't possible since UDP doesn't use a handshake but you never know with network exploitations...

i was using http. should i use the udp option?
how many threads?
what port?
these are the options

i tried udp, port 80 (edfault) and the requested # went very high and my wireless disconnected then reconnected...then my cpu util went to 100% (pentium m 1.6 lol)

Yeah wireless will disconnect with that many packets going to the router. I'd say it's a success then. Try it on a wired connection and see if you can kill it completely for a few seconds  

(This, btw, will not hurt your router permanently)

for a few seconds?

i thought it would like restart completely? or will it just disconnect from everything?

oh and the wireless card in this laptop is only b, so no wonder it didnt do much

It will probably drop all connections until you stop sending packets to it. It may restart though.