Well during the week my dad went out and got himself a Belkin N1 MIMO Wi-Fi router for us to use at home. Straight after this I went and upgraded my 54mbps wireless card to the top of the line D-Link Rangebooster N 650 300mbps wireless card.
This is where the story gets interesting. I removed my old card and installed the new one into my PC. I booted up as usual and when Vista (64bit) prompted me to install drivers I inserted the driver disk that came with the card. Just as I thought, the driver disk didn't contain drivers for 64bit Vista so I jumped on my brothers computer, visited the D-Link world wide web site and grabbed myself new drivers. I loaded the drivers up and detected the home network. I connected to the network and after the connection had established my PC locked up and froze. I restarted my PC with the card still installed, logged on and when the network had connected again I was hit by the blue screen of death. "Hardware error, please restart vista to avoid permanent damage to your hardware".
I called customer service and told them everything that had happened. They told me to try it in a different PCI slot (which I had already tried), they then told me to put it in another PC and try again. I put it in my brothers PC and the same thing happened. I was then informed to take the card back to where I got it from for replacement.
Today I took back the card and exchanged it, I connected to the network...and it didn't crash. I used it for about 5 mins before my system locked up and I was forced to restart the PC.
This time I went to the Australian D-Link site and searched for new drivers, they only offered plain Vista drivers so I downloaded them and tried to install them. The installer kept saying that there was no drivers in the file I had selected and wouldn't update. I looked again on the world wide site and found that the drivers I downloaded were for the same product but with a different model number (I downloaded drivers for DWA-542, mine is a DWA-547). The Australian site only lists the DWA-547 where as the world wide site lists DWA-542 and 552. The 542 drivers are the ones I used originally and are the only ones that seemed to allow me to use the device. I have just downloaded the 552 drivers and will try them. Any ideas or help would be great.
Thanks in advance
The boy 4rm oz