Linksys WMP300N further issues / 34k miles / ADSL Pipex speeds

Wireless N issues continued
Ok to recap I bought
Linksys WAG300N-UK ADSL Router
and the
Linksys WMP300N-UK PCI Adapter.

Disabled some devices , updated the driver and changed settings which appeared to work [see my last Blog entry].......

Alas it did not.......

1. Moved house (the reason I went wireless) and could not get a signal at all! Or even worse the router would appear at full signal strength but as soon as I tried to connect it took ages , then it disappeared.
Eventually I brought the router upstairs and placed it on the desk next to the pci antenna.
Unbelievably it still couldnt connect!!!!!!!! WTF
With them almost touching it worked , isnt wireless great???
Anyway long story short I think its the DECT (Phillips) phone that was causing the issue. Changing to a much lower frequency seemed to fix it.

Ok so now its back and running but.........

2. I got at least 3 further BSOD over a period of 4 days. Not to mention the fact the mouse hesitated every 10 seconds (arghhh!) while the CPU usage went 100%
At this point my PC become a waste of money and unusable , enough was enough.
I downloaded a program called ProcessExplorer to troubleshoot.
It seems as if there are way too many Deferred Procedure Calls (DPC's) causing the issue.
Which of course as far as I can fathom is down to the Linksys WMP300N driver (ar5418.sys from memory).

At this point I had wasted far too many hours on this , so 99.9% sure its the PCI driver I decided to uninstall the driver and disable the card.......
and wait for it....
Buy a Belkin G+ MIMO USB Adapter (one of the slower than N spec devices)

The N spec router is compatible with G (and seems to work well) so I kept that , and both support WPA2 128bit.

2 minutes to install and I'm up and running at 54Mbps (300Mbps for the WMP300N, but no good if I cant use it!)
and the machine is back to normal . Hurray :-) , oh but its another 25 quid.
Signal strength is same as N at 'Excellent' , now thats a result......

So in summary

1. Linksys WAG300N-UK ADSL Router. Nice piece of kit. Id buy it.

2. Linksys WMP300N-UK PCI Adapter. Probably good hardware (look at that antenna!) , however let down by a totally unworkable driver (and wireless utility program , if you dont use windows own zero config program)

DO NOT BUY OR INSTALL THIS PCI CARD UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES UNTIL LINKSYS HAVE RESOLVED THESE DRIVER ISSUES.

The driver version I had was 26thOct2006 I think.

Hopefully I can go back to using it again once a new version of the driver is released.


E46 M3
Oh and 34k miles on the BMW :-)

ADSL Speedtest results
Moved to new address so Ive been testing the bandwidth using
SpeedTest.net

Given the results there must be plenty of people sharing my dsl 'group'
(Contention Ratio I think its called)
Check out the difference between 9.30 pm and 3 hrs later.
Upload speed seems stable but download is over 10x faster after most folk have gone to bed LOL

e.g.
Day Time Download Upload Latency Server Distance
1/18/2007 9:29 PM GMT 449 kb/s 373 kb/s 59 ms London ~ 50 mi
1/19/2007 12:18 AM GMT 6700 kb/s 377 kb/s 35 ms London ~ 50 mi