Following my earlier rant about the trial that is installing Vista with a Netgear wireless card, I thought I’d offer an update on that story.
Firstly, my new Linksys (WMP54G v4.1) wireless card is working fine. Thanks Amazon.
Secondly, I updated the Windows Experience Index score just now. Still the same graphics card in the machine, so I don’t know how but suddenly my desktop graphics rating jumped from showing 2.1 to 4.1, pretty sweet! On viewing the details I also noticed that the graphics card apparently has 334MB of system memory available on top of the 256MB of dedicated RAM. I don’t know if this was the case before or not so can’t say if that influenced the change in score.
Anyway, this brings my overall Windows Experience Index up from 2.1 to 3.0, now based on the Gaming Graphics score (WEI bases your overall experience rating on the lowest score it finds). My system now looks like:
Processor (AMD Athlon 2800+): 3.4
RAM (1.5GB @ 266MHz): 3.7
Graphics (256MB eForce 6200): 4.1
Gaming Graphics: 3.0
Primary Hard Disk (Seagate 120GB 7200rpm): 4.4
Now if anyone can tell me of a Protowall/PeerGuardian substitute that works with Vista I’ll be sorted.
Just thought I’d say you have my sympathy with reference to the disgrace that is the Netgear WG311V3. We’ve got them on both PC’s. When I was running XP I’d get constant drops to 1mbps, & I used to blame my Linksys modem, but I suspect otherwise now. I’m now running Vista 32 bit, & every 2nd day I have to reinstall that crappy Netgear software because it loses the drivers. I tried that software on XP & it was shit then, but at least I could just pull the driver off the disc with XP’s Add Hardware Wizard & leave the rest well away from my PC where it belongs. Vista won’t accept the driver from the disc that came with because it’s for XP, & you can’t get a standalone driver for Vista, you have to have the full nasty retarded package from Netgears awful website. I will be replacing this as soon as I can, but unfortunately for me the only shop open at this time of day is PC World, & guess what they sell, the Netgear WG311GE, & the WPN311GE…think I’ll pass, & suffer until I can get to a proper computer shop, I don’t like that number or manufacturer anymore. Hope everything is still going okay with the Linksys network ard because that’s what route I’m thinking of taking.
Jeremiah, things aren’t going too bad. I had a spot of bother when I tried to change the “channel” (frequency) of my network on the router. The Linksys coudldn’t find it, but I came to the conclusion that’s because I was using channel 13 which is usable in Europe but not the USA (for example) and the Linksys seems to be limited to channels 1-11 which the US uses.
Eventually got it to pick up the network again ok though – that’ll be a lesson to me not to f**k about with my network settings.