pci adapters

I bought this card last December. Opened my desktop PC, installed the driver, put the card in one of the PCI slots, had the desktop connected to the network in less than 20 minutes. Then I spent the next 7 hours trying to get good, reliable wireless connection.

The major complaint I have with the card is that the Linksys should have separated the antenna from the card and allowed users to put the antenna somewhere else via a cable. With the antenna mounted on the back of the card directly, it is completed shielded by the PC's metal case, which makes the wireless transmission and reception poor. With all the cables and connectors in the back of a PC, it also makes it hard to adjust the antenna at all (I had to move the wireless card up and down the slots to find the optimal location). My wireless AP was only about 60 ft away and I was only getting 20 - 30% signal strength and link quality. From time to time it would lose the connection completely. Linksys should really have thought through this antenna issue. After all the hard work and time spent, I finally got the optimal antenna position. I am now getting 40 - 60% of signal strength and link quality. It now runs reliably at 11 mbps speed.

The second problem I had was that this card interfered with my daughter's favorite music player Winamp. Whenever she played music using Wimapm, the wireless card would lose connection and stop working completely. This problem was fixed after I downloaded the latest driver and firmware for the card. Not sure if this is related to the Creative sound card interference problem reported by another review. My desktop does have a Creative sound card.

Sick of the slow download and page load times with a dialup connection I wanted to give myself the speed boost of a cable modem connection. The WMP11 saved me the trouble of having to run an additional Ethernet cable all the way up to the second floor. My wireless router and cable modem is located in the basement which is connected (via ethernet cable) to another PC.

I installed the drivers then the hardware that came packed with the card. Physical card installation and driver installation were both easy. I had a 80% signal strength right out of the box! To be sure I had the latest drivers I checked the Linksys site and there was an updated driver (just released about Nov. 9, 2002). I Downloaded and installed the new driver... now my signal strength is consistently at 100%!!!

The only problem I encountered was of my own doing. I misconfigured a network setting which caused my system (Windows 98 SE) to become unstable. After re-reading the card and router configuration instructions I fixed the problem. So far I've been quite satisfied and there's been nothing but smooth surfing since.

The PCI card worked well when I installed it on XP. Once I rebooted, it never reconnected again. I kept getting an error that it was seeing multiple wireless connections. I spent hours with Linksys tech support -- they were always accessible -- and changed the channel, reinstalled the driver, slowed down the settings. But have been unable to get it working. Now thinking of uninstalling and getting a Netgear instead.