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

I'm not sure what problems everyone else had, but this adapter drastically increased my speeds. I haven't had any disconnect problems as of yet. I have it paired up with a Linksys WRT350N and I was actually surprised with the speeds. I was expecting about half of what I am getting.

This works great out of the box with one exception. After installing the drivers and monitoring GUI here is what you do. You uninstall the card, unplug it, then plug it back in. This allows the card's drivers to work but you can now control this via Window's WZC. Download the KB to allow for WPA2 (PSK2), use AES, and you're set. Works flawlessly with the WRT330N using WZC. Be sure to set the NIC to the same settings as the router regarding Frag Thresh and RTS Thresh. Disable power save as well (on all NICs talking to the WAP). A little tweaky to setup but once it was I get 162Mbps minimum from 50'. I even get full bars from two of my neighbrons who are likely running G.

I bought this new network adapter based on my many years of using linksys products. Linksys had been up to this point extremely reliable and easy to install, as well as long-lasting. I am quite the experience computer user, and most technical issues I can easily resolve - not so with this network card.

Firstly, I was having trouble like almost EVERYONE else who bought this card with connectivity. I had to uninstall the Linksys program, and then overwrite one of the driver files manually with a file I had to download from a guy who posted it on a linksys technical support forum (note that he didn't work for linksys). I had thought so highly of linksys's reputation that I almost reinstalled the operating system prior to troubleshooting the network card (I thought there was something wrong with the way windows was handling wireless networks).

Even after all of this, the speed that it connects with my belkin N-router is marginal at best. About 2 months later, I installed a top-of-the-line ati video card and all of a sudden the sound is rather choppy at a variable intervals. I figured it was a sound card issue or video card issue, and a weird one at that. Turns out the the wireless network card spikes the CPU usage when it transmits or receives just 1 packet of information. I looked online for a fix, and sure enough, other people have the same problem, with absolutely no help from Linksys.

I'm going to remove this card, and throw it away. What a complete and utter waste of money. This piece of garbage prompted me to write my very first review of any product on amazon, so that others may not have the misfortune of dealing with this.

I bought two of these for two different computers. One is a straight windows XP OS and the other one is XP media edition. In a nutshell, the adapters fail several times a week and you must go through the whole install process again to get them up. Repeated calls to Linksys have been no help. I will never, never buy another adapter from them. 20 years of computing and these adapters have been the worse products I have ever bought for any of my computers. Please note, we are talking not just one adapter and computer but two. I gave up on one machine and just ran CAT 5 but the other is yet to be resolved. Oh and stupid me has been putting up with this for over a year now. So, sorry but I cannot recommend for anyone to buy these adapters.

I purchased this card because of the quality of the WMP54GS which I previously owned. I wanted wireless-N performance and decided this card was a good bet, along with the WRT610N router.

While the WRT610N operates flawlessly (along with the LELA network-managing software), the WMP300N adapter has been less than stellar. It installed easily and performed perfectly the first day; the next morning the computer was frozen. And from that point forward, it was necessary to reboot the computer because it kept freezing anywhere from after a few minutes to four or five hours. Uninstalling and reinstalling the driver did no good; at one point, I reinstalled the OS and started all over again. I even did as one forum (a forum I found that was dedicated to problems with this card) suggested, installing the driver, not from the included CD-ROM, but from the web. The initial download speeds of 270 Mbps were no longer seen; I would see speeds up to 110 Mbps. Eventually that speed bottomed out to a constant 1 Mbps.

The forum also said to disable the power save mode, which stopped the computer freeze-ups--a suggestion which Linksys' tech support did not offer. (Linksys tech support only suggested things I had already done, and when I told them I had done the things they mentioned they insisted that I do them again.)

With a speed of 1 Mbps, this card is slower than was my wireless G-card. Sadly, I absolutely cannot, in good conscience, recommend this card.