Linksys WMP54G

[draco]

Long ago and far away, I purchased three Linksys WMP54G wireless adapters for my XP systems. They worked well.

One day an evil elf delivered unto each of my systems an upgrade which disagreed, occasionally with my adapters, generating c++ errors and disconnecting my adapters and requiring a reboot of the system.

I tried to find an updated driver from Linksys, but they had only the originals.

After searching the web, I uncovered information suggesting updated wireless adapter drivers from Ralink (rt2500.sys) which actually solved the problem in the first PC. I later made the same change to the other two since the c++ errors were quite annoying.

This weekend, as I contemplated placing the same wireless adapter in a fourth PC, I found that Linksys has some new drivers available. Not being sure whether I had v4 or v4.1, which are different drivers, I pulled the adapter from one of the systems only to find that it is v1 which uses a different chipset -- one from Broadcom.

How can this be? Should the Ralink driver even have worked?

Any thoughts or comments? At the moment, I'm slightly confused and full of awe and wonder.

I thank you for allowing me to capture your mind for the time it takes to read this.

Kindest Regards,

draco

[puntoMX]

Sometimes companies use each other technology, re-brand and number chips and so on. This would be the most logic explanation.

By the way, if you use those cards just don't install the whole driver package but just point windows to the .INF file and let it use the wireless manage from windows and NOT the trash that came with the card; I've had many problems with the utility that came with those cards. EDIT: unless you use windows 98 .

[draco]

Too late. And the configuration program from Ralink is flaky -- I have to continually select the field to enter each character of the SSID and the Passcode (WPA2). What a pain.

What's this about the .inf file? Where can I find information about the structure of this file. I've tried to install drivers in the past on both XP and 98SE with little luck. I always had to resort to the installer code. The system didn't seem to recognize the actual driver.

On 98SE, I had to modify a .inf file to get it to recognize my video adapter. This for a laptop. I was successful, but the adapter wasn't listed in the .inf file, so I had to add it. The driver ought to be somewhere among the drivers I have for the Dell Latitude C810, but I don't know where to find it. Mayhap it resides in a CAB file somewhere...

Thanks for the reply and the thoughts. The rebranding makes sense. I may also check out the serial number of the adapter since that encodes the version number, in case I'm missing something.

Regards to all, especially puntoMX.

draco