When I installed Windows 7 (good thing I’m dual-booting BTW, or you wouldn’t be reading this) there was no network connection whatever through the adapter.
It appears there are no official Linksys Windows 7 drivers for this adapter. I’ve got version 4. Unbelievable. Does anyone know a workaround for this? I really don’t want to have to go out and buy a new one.
I’m not surprised, it was never officially supported in Vista either. But fear not, workarounds were found in Vista for both 32-bit and 64-bit.
The problem though, is that I tried to follow the links on that page to the driver by Ralink, which is the chipset on your linksys. No dice. But hopefully that thread will get you going in the right direction. If someone got it to work in Vista, I’m pretty sure Windows 7 will eventually work as well. This site seems to have an all-in-one driver but I can’t tell if it’s legit or not.
On a side note, I’m not sure that blaming Windows 7 is where you should direct your anger. It’s a shame that neither Ralink nor Linksys have applied for signed drivers for even Vista. How old is that USB dongle or card by the way?
The adapter is around 3 1/2 years old.
Anyway, I figured out how to go through the device manager and hunt for the Ralink RT2500* USB drivers, and now it works.
Here’s the link, BTW.
*also edited to correct the name of the drivers in question. NOTE: I’ve only tried them with Windows 7 32-bit, because that’s the installation media I have.
Keep your Ralink drivers for now. I had the same problem and while investigating the fix discovered that once you’re connected Windows Update will provide Linksys-labeled drivers for the adapter. Trouble is, they cause network hiccups that throttle the connection speed to nearly nothing for a few seconds at random intervals.
Those drivers may have been updated by now, but I’ve stuck with the Ralink ones and they’ve worked great so I’m not willing to experiment.
Awesome news Papa, glad you got it fixed bud.
I set Windows update to only do security fixes, so that should leave network drivers unaffected, right? BTW, I ended up downloading an .exe from Ralink that might have also included a software suite, but I’m fearful of uninstalling it for fear of wiping out the drivers as well. Any thoughts?
Yeah, the driver update is optional. As for the software suite, if you got it working I’d leave it alone. I had to download about ten different drivers using a netbook before I finally happened upon the ones that worked in 64-bit Win7, and it’s not something I want to do again.
I was in shock when I loaded Win7 and discovered there were no default drivers for that hardware. Linksys is owned by frickin’ Cisco. You’d think an outfit like that could crank out some Win7 drivers. I’ve had good luck with Linksys routers but won’t be buying anything else from them in the future.