Customer Reviews
Very Poor Range
I have it mounted on a wall in my study about 6 feet away from my computer, about 7 feet from my modem and monitor. I did that to minimize the possibility of EMI. My Dell laptop has a new Linksys 2.4 GHz WPC54G notebook adapter. At 6 feet away it has 100% signal, at 12 feet it has 54% signal, at 35 feet away it has 18% signal, at 50 feet way it has 1% signal and stops working. I have 900 MHz and 5.8 GHz phones. I live in a condo 1335 sq. feet. I did not see an advertised range for this item. If I would have been aware that it has such a short useful range, I would never have purchased it. I wouldn't buy another one or recommend it. I will wait until something better comes along.
5 stars for preformance, 2 for installation -I'll tell you how in really install this puppy
After I finally got the thing working after 6 hours of tech support with Linksys, 3 hours with my ISP, and 2 hours with Microsoft, I am please with the product's performance. I'll tell you now don't waste your time with all the tech supports. Here are a few "words to the wise" on getting this thing to work, mainly because from the other reviews of this product, there seems to be a lot of unhappy people. But after a few tricks, I was able to get everything running from square one in about 20mins.
A CUSTOMER CREATED INSTALLATION GUIDE
1.Use the wizard and all to get the router set up for the home network (don't be lazy and use your wireless card to setup the router, use a LAN cable and you can save yourself the heartache later if you mess up the firmware update.)
2.Go to the Linksys website and download and install the latest firmware.
3.go to Linksys website and click to Support > Technical support > Easy connect > Router's initial setup. This will run a program called "Netset." Follow the instructions - If you want an encrypted wireless network, NOW through Netset is the easiest time to do it. Follow all the instructions.
4.With Netset, you will have the option of creating a network disk. Don't try and set up each computer separately; you'll always mess something up doing it manually, get a USD drive, or floppy and make a network disk, this will help make sure every computer is on the same workgroup and there will be no communication problems (for example all your computers can connect to the internet, but they can't "see" each other on the network for file sharing or printing).
5.with the firmware updated, network configured, all options set, and computers configured. Turn all the computers, router and Cable/DSL modem off, wait 20 sec. and then turn modem on, then router, then computers. And your network should be working flawlessly. If not, redo steps 3-5, and double check to make sure all the drivers for your wireless network adapters on all the computers are up to date. Also sometimes after a day or so, something fishy will start acting up on the network. Just run "NetSet" one more time and you should have all the bugs worked out. This happened to me once but I haven't had to reconfigure anything since.
NOTE TO BUYER: If you want to extend your range with the external antenna don't waste your money on an official Linksys "better then generic" antenna, go to RadioShack or Amazon and buy the $19 antenna for wireless-G routers, it connects perfectly to your WRT54GC. As far as the distance without the antenna, it is quite remarkable for an internal; I got good range even without the external.
There have been a few people complain about a router that is "dead" the next day. Ah, the wonderful world of mass production. It is true that every now and then you get a dud, that's life now with the fast paced world of technology. Just send it back and get a new one, there is nothing wrong with the correctly built router.
All in all I have no complaints after the hair-pulling installation.
Worked OK until I tried to upgrade the firmware
This wireless router worked OK at start. It had some quirks getting an IP through DHCP from my ISP (Comcast). I tried to upgrade it to the latest firmware to try to fix that. The upgrade failed. I spent 2 hours with Linksys support and they concluded that the product was gone. They promised me that upgrades were succesful all the time. I returned the product, not wanting to deal with it anymore.
