I would like to write a review on this wireless desktop pc card I purchased from Staples Bangalore.
The card claims to support Wireless -G protocols and provide decent detection of wireless signals at home. The card came in a neat package and looks like any ordinary wireless card. The antenna is rigid enough and assembly is pretty easy .
The installation of the card is highly troublesome software wise. Inorder to install the software the card has to be removed from the PCI slot and the software must be installed first and system restarted with the card plugged into the slot before restart. This is highly troublesome when it comes to desktop because if you have huge computer cabinet which is in some board cabinet this is a lot of additional work once you discover this frustrating Netgear secret.
The card got installed after this was done. I tried it on Vista and it worked for sometime. Something happened on my system and the driver got corrupted. Reinstalling it was a pain since I had to remove the cabinet again to get it detected...what a pain...I would’ve rather gone with ethernet than go though all this pain.
The transfer speeds and connectivity is okay if it gets installed and I faced no disconnections and signal strength was good. I have a Linksys router which is on the other end of the wireless loop and it goes well as long as WLAN card works.
I tried it on Fedora linux and it does not get installed automatically. I never went through the pain since I was already fed up with windows installation.
The card does not officially support 64 bit windows drivers are per their website but the support agent informed that the 32 bit drivers provided on the CD works well for 64 bit windows as well.
I tried Windows 7[64 bit] and the installation from the CD failed. I downloaded the drivers from netgear website and it failed again. I tried Windows 7 windows update it detected the drivers trhough autoupdate and installed it. But still the card failed. Checked in device manager and found an exclamation mark. On diagnosis it revaled error code 10 . Device failed to start. I went to netgear support who assured its an issue with the PCI even though other devices are working and asked me change to another slot and it will work. I tried all other PCI ports and it does not work till now. Hence in terms of support and features it scores little.
If you are using a classic system or a Windows XP then it might fit your purpose.64 bit OS’s then you are in trouble.New and other OS’es like linux avoid this at any cost as there are no drives available. A definite money waste.