Read Part 1
A few days ago I posted my impressions of the Linksys Wireless Game Adapter, you probably didn't read it, but in case you did, here's an update:
While initial tests were positive, I soon noticed that the WGA started dropping connections exactly like WRT54G it was trying to replace. Oh it lasted longer, but in the end it was just a tease. I hate teases, so I took it back to the store and replaced it with the Linksys wireless-g bridge WET54G. That was my second mistake (the first was above). Had I checked the reviews (tsk, tsk, and tsk) I would have noticed that it sucked, and sucked big. We're talking Divine Brown suckage here. Well no matter, as I would soon discover it for myself.
It started off bad enough, no printed user guide, no user guide on the cd (though there was a broken button for it on the setup app), no user guide on the updated version of the setup app, though again it had a button that didn't work. All of this wouldn't have been so bad if the quick start guide made any sense whatsoever, but it didn't. I had to guess what the proper settings were and after oh, 45 minutes I managed to get it right. I did find the user guide, on the website, but it didn't really help much either.
So I get the thing setup, and it seems to be working. All right, my problems are solved! So I start using the connection and all is good... for about 15 minutes. You know the next part. 3 hours of tweaking, re-flashing, resetting, and even swaping out routers a few times gets me known where. Every combination of linksys products: WRT54G+WRTr54G, WRT54G+WGA54G, WRT54G+WET54G, all result in dropped connections.
It gets even better, I decided I wanted to update the bridge's firmware to one made in the past year, not that it was a meant to be a huge improvment, according to linksys's website there were only 2 updates to the firmware since it's release. But anyway, according to the oh-so-rare user guide it should have been as simple as using the built in web administration tool, but the page to do it simply was not there. Not to mention the fact that the web based tool only worked about 1/2 of the time. That's right; almost ever other page gave me an error until I refreshed it.
So I gave up. There was no combination of Linksys products on earth that would meet my needs. For some reason Linksys simply cannot make products that work together. You would think that they would make things that especially worked well together, but that is not the case. The WET54G has been returned from whence it came.
All was not lost however, in a rare moment of reason, I realized that Linksys is not the only brand of wireless products out there and I ran to my local CompUSA, which has a slightly better selection of wireless products and grabbed a Netgear M-WEG101 Broadband Ethernet Bridge. It's been on now for over 24 hours and not a single dropped connection. Imagine that, a product that works! It appears that Linksys can make a product that works... just not with another Linksys product.
For now, all is well.