Another Victim of Linksys.

If you know how to fix it, then why are you whining here? Just go and fix it!

Jerry

Linksys and Compusa aren't conspiring together to mess up people's computers.

If this router isn't meeting your expectations, why not just return it for something else?

The BEFW11S4 is pretty old, anyway. Its even for going for $10 on Ebay.

All the consumer wireless stuff by Linksys, DLink, Belkin, Hawking, etc, is "junk" -- but, it is "junk that usually works fairly well for home use". Thrown together, no real technical support, etc, is all just nature of the beast. All these brands have models that work fairly well for home use, while at the same time have models that have issues. Before you buy home consumer wireless stuff, you really need to read some reviews on different products first so you can aquaint yourself with their known issues and limitations. Again, its just the nature of this beast. Its also possible that you just got a bad piece of hardware.

There is a reason, other than just name, why Cisco products are much more expensive...

Hi, The term, rate implies it has to be based on simple math. If 100 is sold and 20 complains the rate is 20%. If 10,000 is sold and

200 complains it is 2%. You do the rest. You can just directly compare two numbers. So far I never had trouble with Linksys anything. (Oh! I had one bad power adapter which was easy to figure out) Only bad experience I had was with a D-link card bus WiFi card. It ruined Windows registry but I had a back up. No more D-link since.

Hmmm, I am retired I don't side with anyone. I think you are troll. If you know how to fix it then why are you bashing Linksys. I don't bad mouth anything when I fix problem(s). Cars, appliances, computers, you name it.

Tony Hwang hath wroth:

For calendar 2005, there were approximately 140 million wi-fi chipsets predicted to be sold by the major manufactories. The rate of increase is approximately 50% per year. It's a fair assumption that about half or more will end up in products sold in the USA. Of these, 40 million chipsets were intended for wireless routers and access points world wide. You can scrape some interesting numbers from various market research pages such as:

As I vaguely recall, the 140 million and 40 million numbers turned out to be rather conservative, but I'm too lazy to excavate the real numbers for 2006. Foundit. 200 million chipsets for 2006.

Now for the math. About half the chipsets sold will end up in the USA. So, we have 100 million chipsets for 3.7 million square miles. That makes 27 radios for every square mile in the USA, not counting chipsets sold prior to 2006. If I include chipsets sold in 2005 (half of 160 million), I get 49 radios per square mile in the USA. No wonder I'm seeing interference.

Another way to look at it is that are about 31.5 million seconds each year. 200 million chipsets worldwide each year is about 6.3 radios sold every second, 24 hours per day. Kinda like a deluge?

Isn't math fun?

GEEZ!!!

I forget, what's the term for people who make provocative comments on a forum or group in order to get a reaction?

It's a variation on the old "I irritate, therefore I am" !

It worked!

But this is such a group that people turn the irritation into an opportunity to discuss.

Cool.

Steve

Hi, Quality of civil majority.

Why are you here is all you want to do is put down peple who warn others about bad products.

Jim

"flamestar" hath wroth:

Because you didn't put down the product. You didn't even bother to specify the product you bought at the recommendation of your expert friend. What you did was put down the manufacturer and the dealer. If you need help with the distinction, I'll be glad to explain.

Meanwhile, here's your fix:

No need to thank me. You already thought you knew the answer.

Yer new to high technology, right?

Perhaps if you described the issue you are having.

________________________________________________________________

I know you thought I was confused already but now I am confused. Please explain how this is a fix, unless I have a time machine.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Possible Workaround If the WUSB54GC is installed without the Linksys Wireless Network Monitor software, the Windows XP Welcome Screen and Fast User Switching will not be disabled. You can install just the WUSB54GC driver and use Windows XP Wireless Zero Configuration to configure and connect to wireless networks.

Warnings Fast User Switching is disabled by the file GTGina.dll. If this file reference is removed incorrectly from the Windows registry, your computer may fail to boot. Linksys does not support removing this file reference from the registry.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It says install the software without the Linksys Monitor. Well what happens if you have done this already? A fix is something that happens after the damage is not something to do to avoid the problem in the first place.

As you seem to be their spokesman, if your so called fix is only a way of avoiding the problem in the first place then; why pray tell, is the reason that Linksys doesn't attach a warning to the product.You know like a l;ittle piece of paper explaining the problem and how to avoid it.

By the way this does seem to be the answer. Am I right?

---------------------------

6 From: Jeff - view profile Date: Mon, Apr 24 2006 9:23 pm Email: "Jeff" Groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support Not yet ratedRating: show options Reply | Reply to Author | Forward | Print | Individual Message | Show original | Report Abuse | Find messages by this author

No problem, it drove me crazy; I even uninstalled stuff. It seems that their Wusb54gc Wireless adapter(which I bought last week) works great. It's the install cd that causes that peculiar "quirk". So I uninstalled the Linksys utility using add/remove went to their site-downloaded the newest driver(v2.0) unplugged the adapter-plugged it back in-when the hardware

wizard asked to find the driver I clicked the I'll choose option and it took me right to the folder that had the new linksys driver-clicked on the driver folder-not the wusb54gc;the subfolder driver, and BINGO no more locked out fast switching. But it uses XP's wireless utility is all;not the "cute"

little green Linksys one (that is where that GTGina.dll file is located) And just like Vincent said when he showed you that link to the answer;Linksys still;as of yesterday; are figuring out that there's a problem. Glad we

could help

Jeff

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As I see it the issue what precentage of of people who buy a product with have a problem and what kind or problem do they have.

If 90% of the people have a problem that's worse then 10% have a problem and if one product is hard to install but works great once it is installed and another trashes your computers that's worse then one that is hard to install.

It depends on your definition. Actually I first learned porograming in a summer program at high school in 1961. I have owned PCs since since

1982. My first computer had an Intel 8088 chip. I have owned computers since then but I strongly object to products that do harm. If you want your computer trashed then be my guest.

Something that is lacking from the Linksys page that Jeff cited is what you called the Time Machine element.

"Question After I installed the WUSB54GC on my Windows XP computer, I no longer can see the Windows XP Welcome Screen and cannot switch between multiple users without completely logging off. Why does this happen and what can I do? Answer: "

Essentially: Don't do that. But no time machine or solution.

The advice that you copied is to remove the product and reinstall it differently.

There doesn't appear to be a warning posted on the product page at Linksys, nor on the support site that is obvious.

There is this update: "Due to a major earthquake in the South-Pacific area, telephone, internet circuits, and services from the United States have interrupted our call center operations. "

When was that?

Searching for "WUSB54GC login" on the support forum yields the proper advice. Uninstall what you have, and install the new driver. But I hate searching forums. you usually have to wade through many articles to find a clean solution. This should be a prominent article right at the top of any WUSB54GC search.

But you already knew that, since flamestar is a recent contributor, complaining about CompUSA selling the product.

On the download page, I don't see the software similar to the CDROM available, just the driver, which I suppose you might have been able to install from the CDROM without adding the Linksys interface.

Overall, I would say this is a pretty startling error, and deserves some prominent display on the Linksys web site.

It adds a login screen to some systems, such that people are unable to access the system, and in your case it removed a login screen, as I recall.

The solution is not easy to find, and even visiting the download site to get the latest driver might not lead you to uninstall the additional software, which is where the problem lies.

With Windows XP-SP2, I generally don't load anything from the vendor. The Windows-supplied drivers, if you have access to the internet, seem to be good. In this case, the "new" 1.0.2.0 driver is from 2005, so I suspect it would be available from Microsoft.

"flamestar" hath wroth:

High technology is anything that hasn't had the benefit of years of experience and is not already obsolete. That covers just about anything you can purchase new for computers.

Impressive. I'm 59. You have all those years of experience and you didn't bother to check the web site and download the latest drivers? As I understand it, the solution you posted, which is better than the one from the Linksys web pile, is to use the latest driver and Windoze Wireless Zero Config. Good enough, but you didn't do that. Instead, you denounced the manufacturer and the dealer while doing an impressive job of not asking for assistance or describing your problem. As you stated, you're not interested in solving the problem, only bashing Linksys and CompUSA.

I need a rant. In the wonderful world of high technology, there isn't a single device that I can buy that does NOT require an update of some form or other. There isn't a single device that works perfectly. If I dig out the test equipment, there are also very few devices that meet their own published specifications. None of this stuff works perfectly or I wouldn't be in this business. Get used to it because I suspect it will get more complex, more buggy, and even more destructive, as such systems grow faster than bugs get fixed.

There was a time, in about 1990, when I decided that unless something radical was going to change in computing, the whole bug pile would collapse under its own weight. At the time, about 10% of the US population had computers. If computers were going to expand to the rest, it had to have all the features of an appliance. It had to be simple, safe, obvious, standardized, and have a long lifetime. My vision of computing was collection of dedicated appliances, such as a spreadsheet machine, a dedicated word processor, a dedicated database cruncher, and so on, where everything talked to everything else via a common protocol. Divide and conquer as this was the only way to remove the ever growing bugs of a general purpose machine. Lots of other advantages which I won't go into. Since I was in the communications business at the time, I anxiously awaited the release of the ultimate universal communications protocol. And waited, and waited, and waited....

So, what went wrong? Instead of divide and conquer, the industry went for bigger is better. Just pile on the applications and accessories, and let the operating system try to keep order. Well, that's what operating systems are suppose to do. I saw this as ludicrous, since some minor application added on top of this software tower of bable was fully capeable of collapsing the while system. Well, that's what's happening to you. Instead of noticing that 99% of your computer is working absolutely correctly, your life is spent dealing with the malfunctional 1%. Welcome to the new reality of computing. The tail really does wag the dog.

I learned this lesson with the HP45 calculator. I purchased one back in the late 1970's and was immediately informed that it was a loser because some of the obscure trig functions produced erronious results. When I pointed out that I rarely used these functions, I was told that such errors implies that there were other errors and that I shouldn't take the chance. I was apparently more tolerant of errors than my co-workers.

The problem is that you're somewhat of an anachronism. You want perfection. You equate the loss of your precious fast user switching (which I don't use because it's a performance and memory hog), with "trashing" your precious computer and ignore that the wireless device continues to work, that you can still do useful work, and that 99% of everything that you might even remotely want to use on your computer is still working. Perfection is a wonderful goal, but it's not going to happen this week. We might make it with my appliance idea, but that's not where we're going. Meanwhile, the greatest accomplishment of current computer industry, and one which I'm sure it will be most remembered, is training the users to tolerate and live with bugs. Without this, the industry cannot grow, because features and functions get added faster than bugs get fixed.

End of rant. I'll try answer some of your questions:

That's easy. Have you ever heard of the Linksys support web site? It has the URL I posted which includes a crude version of the fix. It could be much better, but it only took me about a minute to guess the model number of your product (since you didn't even bother to supply that), and find something that vaguely resembles your problem. There was a time when little pieces of paper in the box labelled "read me first" were popular, but these days, such addenda, updates, and supplimentary documentation are found on the vendors web pile.

Yes, using WZC to retain use of fast user switching seems like a good solution. Incidentally, there are many other programs that replace the Windoze login system in the name of enhancing security. Novell client, Symantec PC Anywhere, some VPN software, and assorted single sign on systems, come to mind.

However, I do have an issue with the official Linksys justification at:

which claims that: Cause The WUSB54GC software supports LEAP security. In order to link Windows login account information to LEAP authentication, Fast User Switching in Windows XP must be disabled. LEAP has been recognized to be a loser for security and is not recommended.

Without a RADIUS server, all that LEAP authentication offers is WEP with dynamic key delivery. In that case, there's no reason for any changes to the Windoze login and security system. In other words, somebody goofed.

Here's your original post: I bought a linksys wireless adopet fromn Compusa. It scredew up mu log in screen. Lyksys is nothing but a rip off and COMPUSA sells nothing but ripoffs.

What product? You don't mention a product number, you just bitch about Linksys and CompUSA, and your problem description leaves alot to be desired. Do you seriously think Consumer Reports would have much of a readership if, for example, when reporting on say a Ford car they said all Fords suck?

Fow all the time you've spent whining you could have fixed the problem already.

Jerry