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Realtek Wi-Fi utility crashing


CamTron

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Where do I even start with this turd? I recently got this HiRO H50069 Wireless PCI card for my Windows 98 machine. It has a Realtek RTL8185 chipset, and the drivers are listed as "compatible" with Windows 98 SE, ME, 2000, XP, and Vista. The card works fine in WinXP, but under Win98SE, I'm forced to use Realtek's crap wireless utility since Win98SE doesn't have WZC like WinXP does. The driver and utility installed fine, but it has problems. The utility has a 50% chance of crashing at startup. Whenever I change networks, it crashes. Whenever I resume from sleep mode, it crashes. Whenever I try to reset my internet connection, it crashes. Whenever I look at it sideways, it crashes. Sometimes, when it starts up without crashing, it will give me a key mismatch error even though I gave it the correct WPA key. Clicking "ReNew IP" a few times fixes this, as long as it doesn't crash. Only about 1 in 4 times I launch it, I am able to successfully connect to my wireless network, and then it may crash afterwards. I originally thought KernelEx might be interfering, but I booted in "step by step confirmation mode", and disabled KernelEx, but it still crashes. My computer also doesn't enter sleep mode automatically while this thing is running. On top of that, it runs this EAPWake.exe process that constantly consumes 20-30% CPU usage. I've found that killing EAPWake.exe has no negative impact on the utility or my wireless connection.
Does anyone have tips on dealing with this horrendously buggy software?
 

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I thought about that too. I first installed the latest version from HiRO's website, which was unstable. Then, I uninstalled that, and installed the utility from the CD, and it was just as unstable. Both are from 2008, I believe. I'll try searching for an earlier version than that.

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I've solved my problem by using a different wireless card. You won't believe how I found drivers for this thing!

So I have this D-Link AirPlus Xtreme G DWL-G520 wireless card (hardware version B3). I wanted to install this card a while back. I don't have the CD, so I downloaded drivers from D-Link's website (ftp://ftp.dlink.eu/Products/dwl/dwl-g520/driver_software/DWL_G520_drv_revB_v4_70_Build923_S0032.zip), but these were only compatible with Windows 2000 and higher. Today, I downloaded the driver again just to make sure it wasn't compatible and noticed that the release notes file had Windows 98/ME listed under v4.40 of the software, and I had downloaded v4.70. I opened my browser to ftp://ftp.dlink.eu/Products/dwl/dwl-g520/driver_software/, the directory where the file was, and noticed a index_info.txt file there. The file mentioned a DWL-g520_drv_revB_Version-4.40.zip file, but it wasn't in that directory of the website. I googled that filename and found this site http://www.mmnt.net/db/0/0/ftp.dlink.de/dwl/dwl-g520/archive/driver_software which had a working link to that file.
So, the card really is compatible with Windows 98, but D-Link removed support for it in the latest driver version, and moved the older driver versions to a hard do find place.
 

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It's also worth mentioning that I couldn't get the Realtek card to work at all on Linux. Trying to bring up the card's network interface would always freeze the system. I tried multiple distros with varying kernel versions, all with the same result. There's a possibility that the card is partially damaged, causing problems on both operating systems.

I really would not recommend a Realtek based Wi-Fi card on any version of Windows before XP. The bundled utility is buggy, wastes CPU resources, and interferes with power management.
 

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IIRC, Realtek cards and "Linux" (or *nix, or Linux+GNU etc, whatever floats your boat) do not play nice and never have. 

Personally found with W98 and a Netgear WG111v1 USB Wireless dongle that the wireless utility would cause epically dysfunctionality (<- apparently that isn't a word?) with Explorer, to the point of strange fonts, odd behaviour and system hanging. The other issue was W98 wouldn't boot with the device connected, and would sometimes epically screw itself over for 2-3 reboots. The solution was to boot with it disconnected and once the Wireless network was all setup, ensure that the Netgear utility was disabled from opening at startup and only using it when necessary. This helped a great deal.

This issue and my hardware's general sluggishness (plus W98 going nuts when I installed older games or software) meant I was glad to ditch it and go for 2K instead. Period hardware has its benefits when using W98, in my humble opinion. Going too much newer and you open a whole new can of worms. 

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I've just run into an issue with the new Wi-Fi card. Trying to run any OpenGL application with the Wi-Fi card installed completely freezes up the system. The program will start up and run for a few seconds and then lock up. This happens with all OpenGL programs like Quake 3, the 3D Windows screensavers, and even a simple spinning cube demo I wrote myself. DirectX applications aren't affected, though. Disabling the device makes everything work again. It seems strange that a network card would cause problems with graphics. For the record, I'm using an ATI Radeon 9550xl 256 MB graphics card and a D-Link Airplus Xtreme G DWL-G520 Wi-Fi card.

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