Netgear wireless adaptor problem

stulid · 8 Jan 2011 at 23:05

Bought a NETGEAR WNA3100 for my sisters pc, as she wanted to get rid of the Ethernet cable to the BT homehub.

She is running Win7 32bit, and when you run the CD supplied first to install the software, then proceed to insert the adapter into a USB slot as per the onscreen instructions(It says to run the software first), it just sits there trying to "Detect Adapter" with zero further progress.

Tried running software as Administrator.

Different Netgear software of the net.

Tried everything, have ended up installing Vista on her pc to get this thing running as it should, but as we all know, Vista sucks big time.

Any ideas?

Emphacy · 8 Jan 2011 at 23:15

Personally I prefer Vista to Windows 7 for various reasons.
I have had this problem before though, and forgot how I fixed it to be honest.

You say you used different Netgear software from the internet. Did you download the drivers specific to the operating system?

stulid · 8 Jan 2011 at 23:22

yep, there was actually only one driver version for all OS.

ms2010 · 9 Jan 2011 at 13:07

Found this :

http://social.technet.microsoft.com...g/thread/89ba0213-a91f-4a39-9cb1-e91a616591cd

The post that's marked as answer says:

Barb Bowman said:
go into device manager and delete this device and delete the drivers when
asked. Reboot. Run the Netgear installer. Before proceeding, find the location
where it extracted the temp files for this and COPY the drivers somewhere else.
Abort the installation. Reboot.

Then plug the adapter in and point the windows installer at the place where you
copied the drivers. This sometimes works around the issues with the Netgear
installer.

So basically it's extracting the Netgear driver from their installer and not using the Netgear installer or management software, just pointing windows to the Netgear driver when the device is detected and letting windows manage the device.

Might work , only thing I've found so far.