Since I live on my own, I was trying to have less cables as possible in my house. Every room had a phone wired to it. All are now removed and replaced by two simple DECT phones. Being a nerd, I need Internet. With the computer upstairs and the modem in the hall closet I decided to go wireless. So I bought a Linksys WRT54GL router and a couple of Linksys WUSB54GC adapters.
First thing that friends of mine told me that the router itself is awesome but the firmware is crap. And oh boy it was. First of all Linksys does not bother to update their drivers. When I started a torrent it would result have a complete lock up of my computer. I changed the firmware on the router to Tomato. My old dell work laptop and my ubuntu PC with the usb adapter worked fine. But my Vista desktop still had networking issues with a lot of lag spikes and sometimes just high latency. As a result I had an UTP cable lying in my hall to the closet to get some decent Internet. Very ugly but necessary.
This week I grew tired of it. My parents came by and I had to remove the cable to make the hall decent (and the rest of the house). I came across an article about using the chipset driver directly. And now I have a stable wireless connection..
In a nutshell, using linksys is okay, but use alternate drivers and firmware.