How to Find the Linksys Wireless G USB Network Adapter Driver
The Internet has made finding adapter drivers much easier than it used to be. Gone are the days where finding a driver meant hunting through a box of disks or CDs. Unfortunately, people searching for drivers are easy marks for websites looking to generate a lot of search engine based traffic to funnel into pages filled with advertisements or unnecessary products. The key to finding hardware drivers online is using the site: parameter in your Google or Bing search to restrict your searches to the official manufacturer website. They have the most up to date driver files and go out of their way to make sure the files you download match the product you have. Unfortunately, companies tend to move around support files. Currently, Cisco driver support can be found at https://homesupport.cisco.com/en-us/wireless/linksys. If the files you need are not there, use a smart search to find them.
What makes finding drivers for Linksys products tricky is that the company was bought out by Cisco. Since then, the Linksys site has been migrated over to the cisco.com website. That means finding the latest Linksys drivers involves searching cisco.com and not linksys.com. With that key piece of information in hand, things get much easier.
To find the current wireless adapter driver for your Linksys USB wireless network adapter, use a Google or Bing search with site:cisco.com at the end of the search. Your driver should be one of the top three results. If not, those results will likely point you in the right direction.
For example, if you have a Linksys WUSB100 802.11g wireless USB adapter, type wusb100 site:cisco.com into your favorite search engine. Go to the product page and look for “support” or “downloads” to locate the driver files.
Installing Linksys Wireless G USB Adapter Drivers
There are two kinds of drivers for Linksys devices. One kind is an executable file. These types of driver files have an .exe extension. To install these drivers, just double click the file to run it. A setup program will launch to guide you through the installation process.
The second kind of driver files for Linksys hardware is a compressed zip file. Use your favorite zip utility to unzip the files from the archive. To install these drivers plug in the USB adapter. Windows will detect the new network hardware attached to the computer and begin the process to install new hardware. When asked what driver to use, select, Have Disk. Browse to the location where you unzipped the driver files and choose the driver file. Select OK and the system will use your downloaded drivers to install the hardware.
Troubleshooting Linksys Wireless USB Adapters
There most common problems related to installing Linksys USB adapters are either the computer not recognizing the attached USB adapter, or the adapter being misconfigured.
If the USB adapter is not being detected, try the following steps to make it show up.
First, remove any cable being used between the adapter and the USB port. Plug the device directly into the USB port. There may be an issue with the cable. If that doesn’t work, try plugging the adapter into a different USB port. This will sometimes result in the device being detected as a “new” adapter.
Finally, if the above steps don’t work, go into the Device Manager and delete any entries for Linksys USB adapters. If that does not work, delete all of the USB entries as well and restart your computer. The USB ports will be rebuilt upon reboot.
The most common configuration problem is improper security settings. Verify that your Linksys network card settings are correct. Double check that you are using the same SSID as the wireless adapter you are trying to connect to. Also, verify that you have the same encryption method enabled and that the password is correct.
If your adapter connects but randomly drops the wireless network check out advanced wireless network connections troubleshooting.
