So, yesterday in all my glorious geekiness, I thought I would wander into Fry’s and pick up some sort of USB Gigabit adapter in my quest for faster NAS access from my laptop.
Oh glory be, one exists! The Linksys Gigabit USB Adapter
(Author’s Note: I failed big time at this point. I did not read the box to check supported operating systems, seeing as Vista’s been out for quite some time, you’d think something like this would have drivers, right? I did do research for this particular product, and saw it was good, but failed to notice, even then, that Vista wasn’t supported.)
Get home, plug it up, hit the Linksys site (which half the time doesn’t come up) for newer drivers. Oh, there are drivers, from 2005. Yes, 2005, and no I am not kidding. Linksys apparently said they would have drivers sometime in 2008 after Vista’s been out for a while. Are there drivers now? No. Does the XP driver work? No. (Figured I’d at least try it.)
Moral of the story: Check the box and never assume things work with Vista. I will be taking the item back tomorrow to get my money back. The good part is it at least repackages really easy. There’s a reason I went to Netgear/D-Link and left Linksys in the dust. I checked other manufacturers for similar products but came up empty.
At this point, I will probably do all my RAW file photo editing on my main computer (quad-core, 8GB RAM, nVidia 9800). My laptop’s pretty good (dual-core, 4GB RAM, 512MB dedicated ATI graphics), but even having the pictures on my C: drive lags a bit. I will then acquire some backup software, and do automated and maybe manual back ups of my pictures.
