|
(Linksys tech support only suggested things I had already done, and when I told them I had done the things they mentioned they insisted that I do them again).With a speed of 1 Mbps, this card is slower than was my wireless G-card. The initial download speeds of 270 Mbps were no longer seen; I would see speeds up to 110 Mbps.
I wanted wireless-N performance and decided this card was a good bet, along with the WRT610N router.While the WRT610N operates flawlessly (along with the LELA network-managing software), the WMP300N adapter has been less than stellar. It installed easily and performed perfectly the first day; the next morning the computer was frozen.
I purchased this card because of the quality of the WMP54GS which I previously owned. I even did as one forum (a forum I found that was dedicated to problems with this card) suggested, installing the driver, not from the included CD-ROM, but from the web.
And from that point forward, it was necessary to reboot the computer because it kept freezing anywhere from after a few minutes to four or five hours. Uninstalling and reinstalling the driver did no good; at one point, I reinstalled the OS and started all over again.
Eventually that speed bottomed out to a constant 1 Mbps.The forum also said to disable the power save mode, which stopped the computer freeze-ups--a suggestion which Linksys' tech support did not offer. Sadly, I absolutely cannot, in good conscience, recommend this card.
Just plug it in to your PCI port and let vista install the drivers. Unzip it to a folder and then update your driver under the devices screen. Don't mess with the Linksys software it only sucks up resources. You can download the latest driver from linksys.com. When it asks you where you want to search for the driver, point to the folder you just unzipped and it will install it and run great. I think it is funny that there are no PCI adapters with above 3 star ratings because people don't know how to use their computer.
The card did really detected my home network properly with full signal strength, but it couldn't connect to it due to a validation problem that prevented my PC to get an IP address from my WRT610N router, a very weird problem that never showed before when connecting it via Ethernet cable, then I thought it was related to WPA2 authentication problems. I had Win XP search them on the CD and installed them properly. I had Win XP SP3 recently installed on this PC, then I didn't expected to have any issues with WPA2 Authentication due to SP3's already updated with this patch. I had a nightmare trying to have this thing working. I think it tampered with the registry keys too much, corrupting it. Then I booted from this disk checked the Ethernet and was OK, so I installed the drivers ONLY this time.
As I already know that this Linksys-provided software possibly is the culprit, I took another HDD, connected it to the same PC and installed XP SP3.
I tried during days every single advice in the available web forums, also I deactivated this program and used the basic XP's tools to connect to a wireless network, but everything was unsuccessful.
This card works very fine.
I do really followed the instructions provided in the manual, first installing the software and drivers before I inserted the card in the PCI slot (though I already knew about the bad reviews describing this software, but I wanted to give it a chance - bad choice.).
I used the Windows standard utility to connect to the network, and it was completely successful now.
Then I tried to connect this PC using the Ethernet cable and surprisingly the same problem.
It was not a problem regarding some wireless security configuration, something got corrupted since I installed this software and card.
Both windows installations were almost the same, same PC, programs and configuration, the only different thing was this cr@ppy Linksys program.
Other thing, I couldn't use the Windows Restore Utility to roll back the changes that this software did - It couldn't restore to the older settings, but I don't know whether this is related to this software or not.
The first time I used this product and it connected to the internet my computer froze up. I uninstalled the Linksys software and installed only the driver. I only bought the wmp300n because it was on clearance for $25 at Wal-Mart. After that my computer froze up 9 out of 10 times when I used this device. Now it dosen't freeze up and it works good. The mouse and keyboard were unresponsive and "ctrl+alt+del" would not work. That is way too much.
However, the computer still froze up 90% of the time.Another problem with the wmp300n is the fact that it will not work with the Ubuntu(Linux) operating system.I finally got the wmp300n to work without any problems. Now I see why it was no longer being sold there. This used much less CPU than before, around 2%. I had to hit the reset button to unfreeze it. I also noticed that the Linksys software was using around 90% of my CPU every couple of seconds. I had to install Windows XP Professional sp3 and reinstall the driver and not the Linksys software. But it still won't work with Linux.
Make sure to seat the card into the slot carefully and fully. After you extract it, remove any folders named XP.
However, I have it hooked up now and it's running very nicely from a second-floor bedroom to the router (WRT310N) in the basement.There are two things to look out for:1. Do not install from the CD.
As with so many others, I had a very difficult time hooking this up to a PC running Vista. To install on Vista, download the driver from linksys onto another PC so you can put it on a a memory stick and walk it over.The downloaded driver is a self-extracting.exe file (WMP300N_20071019.exe) that contains both Vista AND XP libraries.
There is a warning in the package for this. This is an XP install.
- Load the driver.2. This was the big problem for me and after I re-seated the board, everything worked like magic.
|
