USB Wireless Network Adaptor and XP kink!

Hello, and thanks for taking the time to read here.

My neighbor has an XP operating desktop HP machine. I can't tell you much more about it because it is not mine. He lives directly across the street. I do most of his technical maintenance on his machine, to a point, I'm not a geek, a wannabe possibly but only slightly above the average user. I have been using pc's since 1988. He uses Verizon slow DSL and not only that his pc has been taking up to 4 minutes to boot up. So the other day I thought I'm taking this Linksys USB Wireless adapter over there and using it to access my drive and have the greater speed and access to my files on my computer. BTW, I wanted to use the adapter because his pc has no wireless. And the purpose of my trip across the street was to help this issue with taking up to 4 minutes to boot up.

Now this Linksys adapter was given to me awhile back. I came home, plugged it into my older XP machine and it recognized it, installed it I suppose, do not remember, but it went right on and accepted and used it.

When I plugged it into his it did not work on his XP. It searched the Windows directory for the driver but did not find it. So I went to the internet and found the driver. Downloaded it but it would not install properly. I downloaded it from another site under another file name, it would not install it properly. I am perplexed as it was so easy to use with my XP machines.

Any suggestions why? What to do now? What if I copied the driver library of my XP machine and copied it to his XP machine. Do you think then it would find the driver as easily as it did mine and go on and work? If so what Windows folder has all the drivers available to XP?

BTW, 3.5 hours later and I had his machine booting up at 1 minute instead of the 4 minutes. Cleaned and meaned it's a runnin' machine. But I still would like to know how to get this Linksys Wireless adapter to work so when I go there I have access to files on mine I need and faster internet if I have to download something for him.

Thanks so much. I've written a lot but wanted to be thorough. jack