Best router for remote access, port forwarding and wireless

[#1]

My existing PN (Thompson) router is incredibly slow to access and administer remotely and not much faster with local access. Wireless range is not impressive either.
I am fairly certain that the remote access setting is defaulted closed on a hard reset too which means that I am reluctant to do a hard reset as there is no-one in the property
who can re-enable remote access.
Does anyone have any suggestions for a better router or how I can safety do a hardware reset without loosing my remote access settings?
James

[#2]

For remote access I'd look at VPN rather than direct remote access to the web GUI.  Either use a Raspberry Pi running a VPN server, a server running on a NAS (if you have one) or look at routers with integrated VPN servers.  I use an L2TP running over IPSec on my Billion 7800X router and find it works well. It may not be the most secure setup but client config is very straightforward.  OpenVPN is something else you may want to look at.