2007-03-13 20:25:00
I'm well fed up with the whole PCMCIA switcheroo that I had gotten into to run my stand-by duties. I finally went out to Media Markt to get myself a Wifi card of my own. Who cares if the laptop belongs to $CLIENT? I want to work dammit! X[
I bought the Linksys WPC54g which is the first card that I'd borrowed from a colleague. Back then the card worked a treat and I had no problems whatsoever. But this time around, nothing but trouble! ;_; I think the crucial difference lies in the fact that the card I bought is v3, as opposed to either v2 or v4 (which was what I'd borrowed earlier). Incidentally, I'm running Windows 2000 on this Thinkpad.
Installing the card seemed to work alright: the driver installed perfectly, the card was recognized and the configuration utility installed as well. But for some reason the config util would keep on reporting the card as "WPC54g is inactive", suggesting a driver problem.
Well... A little digging around led me to this thread at the Linksys fora. It seems that the configuration tool (aka "Network monitor") is actually a piece of shit software, that doesn't work properly with the WPC54gv3 *grr*. As was suggested in the thread I installed McAfee Wireless Security, which is an alternative and free configuration tool for Wifi cards.
And lo and behold! It recognized the card and found my Wifi network. Got me connected without a problem. Thank God for McAfee! (Never thought I'd say that!)
Needless to say that my trust in Linksys has gone down a bit. All in all this took me a good two hours, which has well soured my mood :/
kilala.nl tags: annoying, windows, other tech, sysadmin,
View or add comments (curr. 3)
Posted by DM
Thank you so much for having this post available to a google search, I was pulling my hair out and now there will be a very happy child surfing next to her mother on an older laptop.
Posted by memoryic
Hi there,
thank you for sharing with us the solution. I 've been searching for a workaround for days. Found a lot people having the same problem with their WPC54G PCMCIA adapters without a reasonable answer. I would never expect McAfee to be the solution, but it really works, changing my opinion for Linksys. Linksys afterall is the same to microsoft. Very good in HARDWARE, very poor in SOFTWARE!
One last think. It was very hard to find and download McAfee wireless security tool. McAfee sates that's been end of life since 2007, the link is dead, and could not be found anyware on internet. I don't understand that. It's a free utility and what I don't understand is why the withdrawn it from all the internet links. Luckily it has been found on a friend's backup hard drive.
Thanks once again,
Memoryic
All content, with exception of "borrowed" blogpost images, or unless otherwise indicated, is copyright of Tess Sluijter. The character Kilala the cat-demon is copyright of Rumiko Takahashi and used here without permission.
2007-11-10 15:53:00
Posted by DS
Thanks for the tip. The McAfee software is a hell of a lot better than the linksys stuff.
Bit spookey finding this - I'm just back from a week in Utrecht with work, and was working near the Media Markt you mentioned!