Fun with Netgear

Heino wanted to change his network from cabled to wireless so we went to the computer market today to buy the bits. One Netgear Wireless router, three PCI wireless cards, one breakfast and a lot of jokes later we returned to set them up.

There's the easy way to do this and there's the hard way. I'm sure you can guess which way we ended up doing it! Uh huh.

Of course we thought we were doing it the easy way. Did the router to cable modem setup first. That went pretty easily though they do seem to have a rather convoluted way of configuring things. But we got the modem and the router talking and were able to get into the configuration pages from the main system wired to the standard ethernet port.

Then we enabled the wireless side of things and used my laptop to verify it was working. Enabled WPA-PSK, gave it a keyphrase to generate the encryption keys, entered the same keyphrase into my laptop configuration, reconnected and all worked well.

We're on a roll. All that's left is to install the PCI cards into the other PC's, let XP Plug'n'Play do it's thing and we're done. Should take about 2 minutes per PC.

We did the right things. Disconnected and disabled the existing ethernet controller. Plugged the card in, rebooted and followed the 'New Hardware' wizard, straight into a blue screen!

Ok, back away. Up in safe mode, uninstall the drivers, reboot again into normal mode and follow a different route to installed drivers (manual select, have disk). Blue screen!

Safe mode yada yada and go to the Netgear website. Mention made of a new release to get around some XP SP2 problems. So we download that version (16 Megabytes! How can a simple network card driver be THAT big?). Create a CD copy and try that. Blue screen!

Uh huh. So we stop and think it through. This is XP, the cards are supposed to be XP compatible and they're not some random cheapo brand you've never heard of. We must be doing something wrong. And then Heino looks at the antistatic bag the card came wrapped in. When opening the bag we had to break a seal and that seal said, quite clearly, install the drivers first!

Ok, we'll do that. First we did the device manager uninstall followed by the uninstall on the Netgear shortcut under Start/Programs. Following some hints on the Netgear web page we also deleted some .inf files and some files under %SystemRoot%\System32\Drivers.

Rebooted without the card installed and reinstalled the software. Shutdown and installed the card and it still blue screened! Then Heino had a bright idea. Without changing anything else we put the card into a different PCI slot and suddenly all is working!

We moved on to the second PC and this time we did it exactly as that seal on the bag directed. Installed the software first and then installed the card. And the second PC (same motherboard - they were bought at the same time) came up first time and everything worked!

Moral of the story? Follow the bloody instructions!!!