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Linksys WMP54G Wireless-G PCI Adapter

Linksys WMP54G Wireless-G PCI Adapter

List Price: $116.00
Your Price: $49.99
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 3 stars
Summary: On Modems and PC Printer
Review: If you buy a modem or a telephony card, this one is considered good. Personally, I have used internal modem and US Robotics modem which lasted me almost two years for each Personal Pc and three years for a Pacific Internet and Singnet Singapore Internet Service Provider. Recently, I have a problem with Efficient Network Modem which is acknowledged to be a very very good broadbandth modem. Their service is not very good in Singapore, being that you have to bring your not working modem to their Singapore Service Centre at a isolated industrial building in Singapore for servicing by their greedy money modem service professionals!!! If you used a printer, most of us acknowledged that Epson and Canon are the most popular models, jet printer and laser printer being easily found in almost every Singaporean home and Lexmark Z43 is the one I am currently using and which I believe would be the nemesis of Cannon and Epson in years to compete for the business market worldwide. So Cannon and Epson, watch out for Hong Kong based strong brand Lexmark. All said, Compro Computer is a very very good brand to use too since it serves me for almost three years now. I am lucky to have a good computer IT professional friend Mr. Chia Kok Onn, IT manager Singapore of a big MNC firm in Singapore to check on my PC regularly. And not to forget my Pay Department best friend, and upperstudy Senior Top coder Chief Coder Mr. Lee Kok Sin to service and advise on my Internet broadband connection and HP Scanjet and CanonScan N1220U model which are probably the top two scanners in the worldwide market. Do you use a digital organizer too? If so, maybe I suggest to you to use Casio instead of Palm Zire or the titanium model as Casio is made in Japan and is of lasting enduring quality. What does it means, it means that my casio digital organizer has served me well for eight years and it recently is still in good condition. A palm zire may not lasts more than three years with a drop to the floor which may costs you 20% of your cash asset on servicing charge. This is a remark from stingy me who would not spend more than SGD 30 on servicing my Siemens business handphone. All right, that's all on technology comment now, if you are interested in finance websites, do visit me at http://www.geocities.com/derek6196/ I hope to make friends with you too. This is Derek Wong from derek6196@hotmail.com and dwkhkyks@hotmail.com Singapore

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Not worth the price! You can do better with another brand!
Review: Initially, I had no problems with this product. I installed it in Windows XP, and it all went rather smoothly. Signal was significant enough to surf the net most of the time, but it was never great and signal dropped out about 10-15% of the time. It is on the opposite side of my house from my router, but I don't live in a mansion and it isn't that far away that signal should drop out in my house. The card has been installed for about 4 months now and I have been experiencing nothing but trouble. In fact, I can't get it to work anymore. The long and bulky antenna continually falls out of the card because the threads have become stripped even though I have rarely touched it once I installed it. So I was constantly having to push the antenna in to ensure it was connected. Now, even when I have a very strong signal, I am having a compatability problem with Windows XP which I never had before. For some reason, it will no longer automatically detect my network settings. I have had numerous calls into Windows and Linksys support with no luck of getting the card to work. It will not automatically or allow me to manually configure an IP address. I have 4 laptops all usings linksys wireless PCI cards and had have no problems. This product however is just plain flaky and in my opinion, a real piece of junk. It's not built well, the antenna is too long and the product isn't doing what it was purchased for. I have spent (wasted) hours deleting network settings and hardware, reinstalled from scratch and it still installs network bridges that are not required and will not find an IP address. After wasting several weekends, I am giving up and will be switching brands. These types of devices are plug and play, but unfortantely, this card has been anything but. I like Linksys products and stand by my router, but not this card. I expected it to last at least 1 year. 3-4 months is unacceptable and the hassle of warranty replacement isn't worth the $50-60 bucks I'll spend on another brand for half the price of the Linksys product. Not a good value and certainly not worth it's expensive price tag.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Unstable at Best
Review: First of all, I am not biased against Linksys, their PCMIA Laptop cards and Wireless G gateway devices (after loading the latest firmware) are top notch, works fine and pretty stable.

But this product is unstable at best.

Note that my laptop is using Windows 2000 while my desktop is using Windows XP for the WMP54G.

- The original driver disk's software crashes instantly upon autorun. Bad omen, but if you manually run the software from the subdirectory, then you can get the drivers to load, but the WLAN Monitor software will not load (the newest drivers don't help).
- There was a time where the card worked, but unless you are good with tweaking settings/drivers and just plain lucky, then you aren't going to get this thing to work.
- I had to reload my machine and am tweaking and after two days, can't get it to connect. It is maddening, esp when it does "see" my gateway and give the indication that it sees a signal, but won't connect.
- And, yes, I have disabled WEP and running my network at the lowest common demominator.

I really hate to think that I am going to have to go out and buy a diffrent manufacturer card to work with my Linksys network, but the frustrations are not worth it.

Maybe if you are using Win 2000 with this card, then you might have better luck, but really, unless you are an Electrical Engineer with a specialty in wireless protcol design and have a friend at Linksys that can write working drivers for you...go with something else.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Awful
Review: This is the worst networking prodict I have ever had. I highly do NOT reccomend it. I would reccomend the WUSB54G. (It uses a USB port.)

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: No good on Win 98
Review: I purchased an all-Linksys G set - a router, PCI card, and card for my laptop.

Here is my hardware setup:
Machine 1: WIN 98 First Edition; 400 MHz PII, plenty of RAM; Desktop
Machine 2: WIN 98 First Edition; 233 MHz, moderate RAM; Desktop
Machine 3: WIN 2000; plenty of speed and RAM; Laptop

Router:
It is a great product. I hooked it up to Machine 1 and had it running in under 5 minutes and that includes the hardware. I did NOT use the software included - instead I configured the router through the web interface. This is key. The router doesn't even support WIN 98 First Edition according to the min. req. Linksys states. Nevertheless, my setup works flawlessly. In fact, somehow it seems to have increased my Internet speed - something I can't understand, but am more than willing to go with.

PCI Adapter:
I am giving this an average 3 star rating because frankly I didn't get it to work but then again it really wasn't supposed to work with WIN 98 First Edition as is running on Machine 2. Now, here's why I feel I should rate this item at all - even if unsupported, loading software and giving it a try should not crash your system and cause errors. In fact, I had high hopes considering the software seemed to load, but in fact it just gummed up the system. So, after quite a while of trying, my poor old system is worse off than before. I just don't understand why Linksys didn't include a way to work on WIN 98 First Edition. At heart this thing is just a bit of hardware and I would think ultimately not much different to the computer than an Ethernet card. I may be wrong, but why can't they design an interface for the older operating system? Anyway, don't bother if you aren't running a newer system.

Card for laptop:
Worked like a charm. I popped in the software on Machine 3 running WIN 2000 and in a couple of minutes had a great signal. The laptop was at least 50 feet away from the router and in the basement (router on 1st level). So, through walls and over distance I still had very sufficient signal strength and quality. No dropping was noticed, and the settings were all set for a high level of security.

So, overall I'm happy with Linksys. You'll note I leave 5 stars for the other two products mentioned. Just beware of this adapter for older machines.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Peice of crap
Review: I had good luck with several other Linksys products, but this one hit rock bottom. I wish I read the reviews before my friend purchased it. The wired and wireless broadband routers from Linksys are top-notch. Even their laptop wireless adapter works great for me. But this unit was unbelievable. It took hours to install. The software driver didn't even start when you clicked on setup. You got a quick flash and no software ran (using XP). I figured out another way to install it from a tip here (run setup from the Utilities folder). The hardware finally installed, but of course didn't work. Hours later after being on hold with tech support, I was told to hard-code an IP address in the card (my DSL provider provides IP addresses automatically). It worked for a few hours and stopped working. That was when we gave up. Linksys really struck out with this garbage. They obviously have no experience or business being in the PCI card realm. They should have stuck to routers. We bought a D-link PCI card (for HALF PRICE!!) and it was literally up and running in less than 5 minutes. It showed a strong signal and the funny thing is that for the few minutes that the Linksys card was connected it was reading a weak signal (from 5 feet away from the router).

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: What is the deal?
Review: I installed this card in a AMD Duron 1000, with 192 MB memory PC. It was running Win98se. I installed the drivers and then the LAN MGR would not load properly, the Splash Screen was cut off. That didn't matter I was still connecting with no problems. Since the card installation, I upgraded 98se to ME and still no problems.

One thing you might want to look at is upon setup. Mark it to Ad-Hoc, once you do this, everything falls into place, it did for me. I would use this card again and I would recommend it.

It connects with full strength (under router, across basement). I have the SSID broadcast turned off and MAC filtering on. Works great, no issues as of yet, connects everytime.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Unreliable doesn't begin to describe it
Review: I finally returned my WMP54G after a month of trying everything in the knowledge base at Linksys, numerous phone calls to support (not easily reached) and grasping at straws. This product was awful.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Linksys = Bad Driver Software + Poor Tech Support
Review: Tried to install this card on my old PC. Box said driver could run on WIN98se. Crashed my PC before the installation was completed. Tried wired card after that, same kind of crap. The technical support is practically non-existent. Returned them and bought D-Link - works like a charm. Conclusion: Linksys is not a trustworthy brand.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: My two cents on the "horrible product" side
Review: The polarization of reviews here is startling. There appears to be NO operating system or configuration that works consistently. The lucky few who had no problems just seem blessed.

My experience is in the horror story side. I (stupidly) didn't do research and purchased the WMP54G. I have now spent 4 days working with two machines and have not had a successful install of both the adapter and the monitor.

As others have found, phone tech support are some of the most un-informed I've encountered. I can't comment on email, as I haven't received any response. The "knowledge base" online is just a re-purposed copy of their inadequate manuals. There is no attempt to publish problems and work-arounds that people have reported.

I have spent way more time on this than it is worth, but I can't believe there is no way to make it work. I imagine I will soon get tired of banging by head against a wall and return all this Linksys junk.


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