My company have been using DLink DWL-G122 wireless USB adaptors for nearly a year now. And I didn’t have any problems with them. Ph sure, it has some problems at the beginning with random disconnections with our various access points, but that would very likely be having too many wireless devices sharing the same channel. I solved it by changing some of the access points to another wireless channel to reduce saturation. However, I have been using them for Windows XP systems and the drivers worked great.

And now, they have changed most of the systems to Windows Vista. That’s when all my problems occur. When the new PCs came, I went and download the beta drivers for Vista. Those drivers were updated in March and have not been updated since then. Yes, that’s nearly 4 months of being slack and lazy for our beloved DLink. Oh, did I mention the drivers were beta? So after downloading the drivers, I installed it. The installation went fine and the DWL-G122 USB adaptors were correctly identified by Windows and all the drivers seemed probably installed. So now, I tried to connect to my access point. No luck there. It kept on saying that there is a problem with the wireless network. I tried with another adaptor, same problem.

So I went and download the full installer for DLink DWL-G122 adaptors. It comes with a monitoring system and some other software. But alas, that didn’t help either. The same problem occured. I phoned DLink support and was told that they have only beta drivers available as the latest drivers were “still in testing“! Guess they have been testing their drivers for 4 months and maybe they will wait till the Wireless USB Adaptor becomes obsolete before they will release the Vista drivers.

I had not other choice but to try another method - using Windows XP Drivers and see whether they will work for Vista. Risky but luckily it did. The monitoring software is designed for Windows XP and it failed to load up but the drivers itself worked perfectly. Since I had the original CD and this came with the monitoring software, I had to install the software first then uninstall the DLink monitoring software later. But thank god, it worked great. I was wondering what DLink have been doing all these time - creating a driver for Vista that doesn’t work for Vista and having an old Windows XP driver which ironically works for Vista??