Now for my new office I got that new WVRS4400n – a wireless router with VPN access, stateful inspection firewall and all sorts of goodies.. (or not – more on that later…) and this router supports the draft 802.11n wireless standard – that’s the technology to run 300mbit over air by bundling multiple channels… very nice I thought, so I better get that PCI adapter as well to benefit from the even farest PC in my office without wiring the CAT6 cables thru the whole place

Now the install is a bit tricky – as they tell you to NOT plug the card into the PC, first install software, then shutdown, plug in, startup again, yadda yadda… what a time waster

Then I found myself connected at 300 Mbit – fine… DOWNSTREAM!

The upstream of this funky technology was slower than my broadband upstream – 1024 kbit / sec – 1 mbit only…

I thought those Linksys guys were smoking crack for selling such card off-the-shell for $120 and

wanted to update the drivers… it must have been the drivers, as it’s always the banana software shipped with ready hardware

So I went to linksys.com to download the recent drivers and yep, they announced “Speed improvements” in their driver…

so I uninstalled the whole thing and loaded the new drivers

Hardware not found

damn.

so I uninstalled the card, rebooted, installed the card again, rebooted (what a time waste) as the LinkSys gurus suggested

Hardware not found

Am I nuts?

Did I break something?

Ok – off to the forums…

some wise guys suggested to download the bcmwl564.sys for my WMP300N – a driver directly from broadcom – dated 2003…

Nah – that can’t be it…

another wise guy from LinkSys suggested to try the card in a new PC, maybe IRQs were broken… what a crap… we have 2007 and PCI assigns IRQ lines automatically… that’s technology from 2000 or so – I sometimes wonder where these guys have their experience from … Windows 3.1 on a 386DX-40 from AMD? probably just another mac user who read about IRQ problems on PCs somewhere in an outdated forum

Ok – back to LinkSys support

Redownloaded the whole crap.

Compared directories…

Oh – look – funny, the new versions really have the bcmwl564.sys driver inside.

But why the hell did my originally shipped driver CD have a ar5416.sys driver in it’s folders?

That’s the driver for the Atheros AR5008 wireless driver… obviously completely different than the Broadcom thing.

Did I pick the wrong card model? No – LinkSys WMP300N – 802.11n draft card

Are me nuts?

Then it dawned upon me…

Try Linksys.de … finally I remembered that Wireless frequencies are way different between US and EU – even country specific

and guess what – I could download a driver for LinkSys WMP300N v2.0

that says in it’s release notes

my shipped version was 1.0.0.5 or some lower number… no wonder it didn’t work, but crashed the PC a couple times

Now that’s a PAIN ... how come LinkSys sells this crap all over Europe but has no intention to point EU customers from their linksys.com

site to an EU-specific directory or at least their country specific site ? (by the way: I hate to be auto-redirected to germanish sites just because my IP seems to be located in Austria… I’ve been using “swedish” ip ranges too, and that’s a weird language to download drivers in…)

Hey LinkSys – I spent 3+ hours hassling back & forth with your hardware, because

a) Your LinkSys (a division of Cisco) product didn’t work out-of-the box as advertised and sold

b) Your LinkSys (a division of Cisco) product support gave me drivers for a card I’m not even allowed to purchase in the EU

c) Your LinkSys (a division of Cisco) support community support is full of guys who think you can still set IRQs manually on a PC in 2007

You know why I bought LinkSys?

NOT, because it’s priced almost 40% premium over other WLAN hardware providers?

NOT, because I like their name

Just because I thought – hey, it’s a divison of Cisco, and Cisco is a good networking brand… damn Marketing.

Reality is, both – the LinkSys product shipment AND support both don’t justify the price. In fact they suck

I was somewhat branding-tricked into buying this – even despite the big inventory write-off of Cisco Systems in 2001 where Cisco’s value was not halfed, but went down to 20% of it’s stock value – within a couple days…

Maybe I should just read more financial news before buying some new hardware components…

Or just go and buy D-Link for half the price ... can’t be worse.

What is your experience with LinkSys products?

In the EU?

In the USA? (where it seems to work better)

PS: by the way – the PCI card and the WIFI router are placed in their test setup with about 2 meters distance. The new version 6.0.2.9 now has a symetric transmit rate… of 54 mbit/sec , NOT 300 mbit… now that’s the next bummer…

PPS: the link to download the Euro driver is here