pc cards

I telecommute full-time from home and decided to get wireless network gear to allow me to work from anywhere in my house. Based on my previous good experiences with their other products, I decided on a Linksys setup. Setting up the Linksys wireless router was a snap, but unfortunately this "matching" PCMCIA card was not nearly as easy to get working.

Windows ME:

My first few installation attempts were on WinME. The driver installer, on the provided Linksys CD, had problems locating the necessary files it needed to install. The CD was either missing files or the installer was looking in the incorrect folders. Either way, pretty sloppy. Downloading the latest drivers from linksys.com fixed the installation problems. However, I was unable to get the card to make the wireless link with the access point.

Windows 2000:

Frustrated, I switched to the OS I should have installed it on in the first place, Win2k, where the drivers installed with no problems. However, again the card was unable to link with the router.

User Manual:

The manual supplied with the card, at first glance, looks promising. Flipping through, you see quite a few screenshots of their configuration utility (supplied on the CD) and a lot of text. However, I was disappointed and confused once I dug in. The text did little more than label the different configuration utility views and properties in each screenshot, providing little or no explanation for what the setting does and why. I could not even locate an explanation for what the LED's on the PCMCIA card indicated.

The most frustrating aspect of the user manual was the section I needed the most: troubleshooting. The troubleshooting section was a whopping two pages (not front and back) and consisted of three questions.

Linksys Technical Support:

Linksys has 7-day tech support, so I was able to contact them on a Sunday, which was nice. The quality of their technicians is what you would expect - good and bad. I first spoke with a guy for 30 minutes who was little help and, as I later found out, actually gave me some incorrect information. I called back later and managed to get a hold of one helpful technician that took literally 2 minutes to determine the problem and step me through fixing it. I also asked a few basic questions that the manual couldn't answer and the technician acknowledged that the user manual was "embarrassing" and "missing critical setup information".

Summary:

The card works great! While the router sits in my basement, I tote my laptop around the house and am able to work in the living room, back patio, on the 2nd story, etc, and the download/upload speeds are as fast as my desktop, which is cabled directly to the router. Despite the problems I had, I would still recommend the card. If you have trouble configuring it, I would seriously advise skipping the manual and just calling Linksys tech support.

I use the WPC11 at home with the BEFW11S4 wireless router. The range is acceptable in our small apartment -- good reception up to 15 feet away from the router, reasonable but prone to cutting out up to 30 feet, pretty unreliable beyond 30 feet -- and the router handles two connections simultaneously pretty well.

However, the software, both that supplied with the card and the updated versions from the Linksys website, is very poor:

- As noted by other reviewers, it is very bad at finding hotspots. I have never had the configuration utility find a network's SSID automatically; I've always had to enter it manually. My partner's Mac is always able to associate to a network automatically, so it can clearly be done.

- There is an ENORMOUS memory leak in wpc11cfg.exe, the configuration utility. I've seen it use over half of my machine's available 256 MB of memory, slowing down the performance of all my other, more important applications.

- The configuration utility has a non-standard user interface. For example, there's no "Help->About" menu item that lets you find out what version you're running. This is a baffling omission, because surely the version is one of the most helpful bits of information you can give the helpdesk. It may seem a small complaint, but it's very frustrating to find out you don't know how to make your software do standard things.

- One of the programs that it installs, vanguard.exe, crashes at least half the time when I start up my Windows 2000 laptop. I renamed vanguard.exe to vanguard.exe.bak, so it no longer gets run on startup, and everything still worked. Vendors shouldn't make you run software that doesn't do anything!

Despite these complaints, the card is an acceptable buy if the price is right; it gets the job done, and the software hasn't annoyed me enough to make me buy a different card. If there's a different card at the same price, though, consider the different card very carefully.

There are a lot of reveiws complaining about getting this device working. I've successfully installed it on WinCE, Win98, WinME, Windows 2000 (All service packs) and on every beta/RC build of Windows XP right up to the final release. I put down most of the problems described as user error, configuration error or a lack of technical know how on networking/os/wireless technology. Wireless cards from all manufacturers are a little more complex than other devices. The range is not as great as my CISCO Aironet, but at a fraction of the price what do you expect.

Linksys support is not the greatest but when i bought my BEFW11S4 Wireless 4-Port Cable/DSL Router i needed 128bit encryption which was not available at that time and within an hour they emailed me a beta version of the firmware that enabled this functionility. With an infinite amount of differing system configurations i think users often expect far too much from technical support. It is impossible for any firm to validate every possible system configuration. I've seen Cisco Aironet and Lucent Orinoco have just as many issues.

Its also worth noting that 2.4Ghz cordless phones can have a negative effects on 802.11 networks.

Enjoy,
N.