Why can’t I just download the whole thing?
At work they were selling a bunch of the old PC’s, and since my dad was wanting a laptop, I picked one up for him. One of reasons that they are selling the machines is that they have no networking capability (another long story). My dad picked up a Linksys PCMCIA card, and asked me to install it so he could connect to the network. This should be easy to do, right?
So, I stick in the cd to install the drivers, and get a prompt that you need IE 5.5 or greater to install their software. So I go up to the Microsoft site on another computer that has networking ability and download the IE 6 setup program. After copying it to the laptop, I fire up the install, and it says that it will need to download 13.9MB of files in order to install. That is not going to work with no internet access.
Being a technically savvy individual, I take a peek at the cd. There is a folder with the drivers in it, so I stick the network card in and install the driver. Now Windows detects the card, but there is way to select a network to connect to. Looking at the cd, there is also a utility folder with a setup.exe in it. Launch the setup program and now had the Linksys software installed. I fire up the software, and it says that it is searching for a network, but it never finds anything. This is not going very well so far.
Since my manual installation fails, I uninstall everything and start looking at trying to get an installation of IE 6 that does not require any downloading on the install computer. After a bit of googling I found this site. It seems that if you pass super special parameters to the installation, it will allow you to download all of the files that are needed. After copying all of these to the laptop, I install IE 6 successfully. I then run the official Linksys setup program, and everything works just fine.