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Netgear MA311 802.11b Wireless PCI Card

Made:	Netgear
Media:	Electronics
Sales Rank:	1,715
Availability:	Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price:	$79.99
Our Price*:	$65.99

*Price subject to change

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11 Mbps wireless desktop PC networking
Reliable, 802.11b standards-based networking
40/64 and 128-bit WEP encryption security
Supports Win 98, Me, NT, 2000
3-year limited warranty

Rating: 3.48/5 from 27 reviews

Very good and reliable card

Rating: 5/5

I use this card with the Netgear MR814 802.11b Wireless 4-Port Cable/DSL Router and they work together flawlessly.
I've had my network up since November every single day without spending more than 2 hours to set it all up. The signal strength I get is really good even with two floors between the router and the wireless card.
For those of you interested this card works great with Linux as well. I use kernel 2.4.24 and I never have a problem, while I had some issues with versions up to 2.4.20.

It works equally well with XP and 2K as well.

Lousy Software & Support, Great Hardware

Rating: 3/5

Software & support 1 star, card 5 stars. I have two of these, and they work quite well with M$ generic drivers for Windows 2000 & XP, and Linux Orinoco drivers.

Netgear's own software is lousy on Windows- aside from the installer corrupting my registry once and putting a bunch of icons on my desktop, it doesn't add anything beyond Microsoft's. Their drivers don't even exist for Linux, but since they use a generic chipset, most distributions can support it. Their telephone support doesn't exist, and it is nearly impossible to find any helpful information on the MA311 on their website.

Those negatives aside, the card works quite well, which is the most important issue for me. If you're technically competent and don't need any handholding, this isn't a bad card.

Continual pain

Rating: 2/5

Never worked properly in windows 2000, but that could be due to something else. However:

If you have this MA311 card in a Windows 2000 computer then upgrade to XP, IT WILL NOT WORK!

I have tried this process on two separate PCs; the card is then unusable in that machine afterwards, no amount of changing PCI slots, un/reinstalling drivers helps, you just various annoying windows errors such as 'driver installation was unsuccessful'.

Tech support are quite useless and sound very much like they're reading from a script, mainly because that's exactly what they're doing.