I've been away working all week and so when I got home yesterday I was pretty keen to pick up the combination box that I'd ordered from Amazon including an Xbox Live starter kit and a LinkSys WGA54G wireless adapter which I was hoping would plug into the back of the Xbox for me.

In our house, the xbox is in the lounge and my wireless ADSL router is upstairs and, due to there not being any kind of phone connection in our lounge there's no way I'm going to be able to connect the Xbox to the outside world other than drilling some holes in walls/floors or getting it wirelessly connected.

So, I went ahead and ordered one of these LinkSys boxes which plugs into the ethernet port on the back of the Xbox and connects it to your wireless network without the Xbox ever realising that this connection is wireless. Microsoft has a similar solution up on http://www.xbox.com but, today, this only is sold in the US so I went with LinkSys.

I've spent around 5 hours trying to get this stuff set up today. The way that setup is meant to work is as follows;

1) Plug the LinkSys box into the back of an existing PC with an ethernet cable.

2) Run the setup wizard.

3) Plug it into the xbox now its configured.

The first problem that I had was that the setup wizard did not find the LinkSys box when I plugged it into my PC. To be honest, I'm not even sure how it was supposed to find it because there's nothing in the instructions about setting up any kind of IP stuff so that the wizard can locate the device. The device comes pre-configured with an IP address of 192.168.1.250 and if you're not already on a 192.168.1.* network then you're not going to find the device without some kind of miracle.

So, I reconfigured my desktop so that it could see this 192.168.1.250 address down the ethernet cable and used the web-setup pages on the LinkSys box to configure the box. To cut a very long story short, this took me an awfully long time due primarily to two reasons;

1) The green light representing wireless comms on the LinkSys box is documented as being on "solid" when it's connected to a wireless network. It isn't. It just flashes as data goes by it which is fine but the docs have it wrong so you spend ages assuming that the box isn't working.

2) The docs don't say that to reset the box you have to keep the reset button pressed down until the power light flashes.

3) The docs don't say that when you change a config setting the box resets itself (i.e. again the power light flashes for 30 secs or so and then it's back in business).

4) The box takes quite a while to wake-up from a power down or config change. If you don't leave it a bit of time you'll find you're testing it before it's ready to be tested and that's a problem.

5) The first response from the support people at LinkSys wasn't great in that they said the box would not work with any wireless routers other than the one that they make. When I called back after reading the docs that say "This box works with any 802.11g/b routers" I got a really good support person who spent a lot of time with me but ultimately advised that I return the router and get a replacement as it must be faulty.

For people who use this box in the future, here's how I would recommend setting it up (learnt over the space of 5 hours on a Saturday afternoon). This is especially relevant if you have a network with a none 192.168.1.* address range.

1) Plug the box into your PC with the supplied ethernet cable.

2) Change the IP settings for your network card on your PC. Give yourself a 192.168.1.249 address, subnet mask 255.255.255.0.

3) Connect to the config UI on the LinkSys box using IE to go to 192.168.1.250.

4) Set up your configuration. In particular, make sure you get your WEP settings right (if you're using it) and that the box reports that it can connect to your wireless network whilst you're in this screen. Change the IP address of the box from within this screen (e.g. for me I set it to 192.168.0.250 which fits with my network). Also make sure that you give the box a default gateway for your network environment.

5) Having set up your config, unplug the ethernet cable from the LinkSys box and power it off and on. Wait until the power light stops flashing and do a "ping -t 192.168.0.250" or your equivalent from a box on your wireless network. Wait a good 5 minutes before deciding that it's not working. If it doesn't work go back to (2) and repeat (2) to (5) until you get the settings right.

6) Once you're able to speak to the LinkSys box wirelessly, take it over to the Xbox and connect it up. Make sure you can still ping it from elsewhere on the network.

7) Now you're into Xbox Live set up which is a separate area so visit http://www.xbox.com/connect I found this to take me about 10 minutes. My advice here would be that the Xbox is just a PC but it's slightly harder to diagnose stuff going wrong on there than it is on a regular PC so if you can't get things to work from the Xbox (e.g. I couldn't get it to contact my DNS servers at my ISP) then what I'd recommend is to unplugging the LinkSys box from your Xbox and plugging it into the ethernet port on the back of a regular PC and don't put it back into the Xbox before you're happy that you can use the regular PC with the LinkSys box to communicate with DNS servers and the such-like that the Xbox needs to talk to.

At the end of all that you should be just about ready for a bit of online gaming!!!! It's not nearly as hard as it sounds if you get things done in the right order and you have confidence that the thing will ultimately work (which it will) - it's the nagging doubts part way through the process that are the problem.

Hopefully I've doc'd enough here to help someone else through it. For info my setup is the LinkSys WGA54G with an SMC Barricade wireless router and an Xbox. It's all (now) working just fine so if you have similar kit then you should have no problems.