Home > Consumer Reviews > Linksys Wireless-N PCI Adapter WMP300N

I am running Windows XP, sp2 and had nothing but problems with this card (Linksys WMP300N). In short, the wireless would connect to my router (also Linksys N) for a short period it did provide internet access, but within 5, sometimes 10 minutes, the computer would freeze up. No movement, mouse, keyboard and applications all froze. I spent a couple weeks working off of a number of forums, tried a number of fixes, including bypassing the Linksys management tool, using the Windows wireless manager, but to no avail. I broke down and went back to Frys and picked up a Belkin N today - works like a charm, no lockup, no freezing and the wireless access is up and running again. My best advice, save yourself the headache and pick up a different card - perhaps the problem is related to Windows XP and if your running Vista you may have better luck than I did. No offense to Linksys, love the router. But the WMP300N leaves much to be desired. Thanks for reading and good luck.

Having had quite a bit of success with Linksys products in the past at first I decided I couldn't go wrong buying this product. However, immediately after installing the Linksys monitoring software and drivers on my PC, it would lock up or there would be a random BSOD within about a minute or so.

After searching around the net the key was to uninstall the Linksys monitor (allowing Windows to control the connection), download the new drivers on their website and bypass the setup.exe by manually installing the driver. Also, one has to turnoff the power save mode under the network connections advanced settings tab otherwise there is instability waking from suspend.

After a couple of hours of my time I managed to make the product work and it seems to work well in my environment. However, I'm not happy with the fact that the software is worse than useless and that calling support was a waste of time since they simply said: "try another PCI slot." Unless you are comfortable with manual driver installs I would stay away from this product. To avoid potential headaches do not install from the enclosed CD!

The good news is that this 802.11n card works reliably, and delivers better throughput than the G card it replaced. It also gets a stronger signal, and it experiences fewer drops in a low-signal zone. There are, however, no miracles. In my implementation, the unit connects between 70 Mbps (megabits per second) and 120 Mbps. The *throughput* is about 25% of that connection. So yes, it is better than wireless G, but it is not amazing, and it is definitely not "(up to) 12 times faster" than 802.11g. I use an Apple Airport Extreme N/G/B wireless router.

Here are the gotchas (Windows XP):
(1) Do NOT install the software from the CD. Download the driver only from the Linksys web site, and install only the driver. Even though you specify only the driver, the installer will install other stuff too. More on that later.
(2) Install the card, and start your PC. Let Windows find the driver (you have to tell it which directory to look in) and install it.
(3) Go to your Start menu, in the new Wireless card item, and run the Uninstaller to uninstall the Linksys configuration utility. This thing runs all the time, and consumes about 100% of the CPU.
(4) Reboot. You should now have clean, stable 802.11n wireless access, and your CPU should be down around 0% used.

It's an imperfect solution for an imperfect world, but it likely delivers better stability and performance than your current wireless G card.

I have been having issues with wireless networking in my house. I'm not sure if it's the wiring or what, but I've gone through a series of wireless routers and wireless adapters trying to get a combination that will work.

This one does work... provided that you tinker with the advanced settings and turn off WMM and Xpress Technology. With them on, I was getting some ridiculous amount of packet loss in Quake. With them off, it played reasonably well. More tinkering with the advanced settings, and I have it running relatively smoothly now.

So... it's fine, as long as you're willing to tinker away at it. I never installed the drivers off the CD so I never saw the bluescreens of death, just downloaded the drivers off the Linksys website and everything went fine.

I won't be TOO verbose but I am VERY satisfied with my purchase. I have read all the negative reviews and information out there about this adapter but actually I have found it to work quite well. I do this for a living and generally always go with Linksys equipment, especially for my home...I've always found it to be the most reliable for my applications.
I DID follow the advice of many (even on the LINKSYS Forums by the way) and not load the Linksys software on my system. I just loaded the driver. That seems to be the key. Just install the adapter in your system and when the system finds the adapter just install the driver itself from your CD. I will say that I found that using the driver that came with the adapter I got speeds up to 270M...I upgraded the driver to the latest one on the LINKSYS SITE and found that my speed seemed to drop down by about a third...may be an anomaly, I'll try to tweak it a bit and maybe I can get the speed up on the new driver.....for now I went back to the original.
I also tried it on a VISTA machine...VISTA immediately recognized it and didn't even ask for a driver but it didn't recognize it as a Linksys adapter, this worked fine but I thought I should use the proper driver so...I uninstalled the driver and installed the 'unsigned' Vista driver that was on the LINKSYS site....
This adapter has been running like a charm for a couple of weeks now...my kids even commented on how the internet is faster...go figure....