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First of all, I woould like to commend Amazon.com on their fast delivery. I ordered it on Monday morning and I got the package delivered to my front door the next morning. That was with the free shipping option, which was suppose to take about five days.
Now about the Netgear WGB511 802.11g wireless networking kit...I was able to get the router running with default settings in less than 10 minutes after I took it out of the box and that includes the time that I used to figure out how to use my old Linksys HPRO200 router as a bridge to my HPNA network. Upon inspecting the firmware version, I noticed that the version posted on Netgear's web site is newer and includes WPA-PSK so I quickly downloaded it and burned the new firmware. Except for the slow download from Netgear the whole process went very smoothly, however, the instruction for setting up WPA-PSK is minimal and it took a bit of guessing on my part to set it up (had to guess what needs to be done on my Windows XP, but only took couple tries.) The range of the wireless network is good and I was able to get excellent strength readings throughout most of the house. Over all, I am extremely pleased with the Netgear router so far, I just hope it won't quit on me prematurely as my Linksys wireless AP did right after warrenty expired.

I bought this combo because I wanted to upgrade my wireless network with faster speed and higher security. The speed is no problem, but the security is. After upgrading firmware on the router, I was able to configure WPA security (the best wireless security) with no trouble. The same did not hold true for the PC card...I got installation errors on the software upgrade for the card (you can't use WPA without the upgrade), and apparently for certain computers, especially those with AMD processors, the upgrade software simply doesn't work. Tech support was a big waste of time so far.

If you want WPA security and you have an AMD-based laptop, you might want to think twice.

The following is a recount of my personal experience with this Netgear product as well as my own opinions about the products usefulness.

My background:

I am a computer programmer with about 10 years of work experience and a 4.0 grade point average from an Ivy League school.

I was not able to get this product to work with an IBM ThinkPad T22 running Windows XP. I got the infamous "Code 10" problem that many others are seeing with this product. (...)a google search for 'netgear wg511 "code 10"' to see more.

Besides the problems that users are having, the technical support requires that you traverse "Bangalore Hell", from which you will probably not receive the information necessary to fix the problem (which, from the above posts, seems to be a driver software problem).

I tried various versions of the drive software downloaded from Netgear, including the latest 2.7.0.0 driver. This was the latest software available as of July 17, 2004. I was never able to get my laptop to properly recognize the card. No combination of removing and reinstalling drivers, removing and reinserting the wireless card, or clearing out Windows registry keys helped.

There is a reference to this problem on the Netgear website. However, it is terse and does not seem to offer a solution -- none of the approaches listed helped solve my problem (...)personal "solution" to the "Code 10" issue was to pack up the Netgear router and card and return it to Amazon. I have since replaced it with a Linksys combination which worked right out of the box. I didn't even need to install software -- Windows XP's built in Wi-Fi support was all that was needed.

Please note that this is only my personal experience and the experiences of various other anonymous posters on the Internet. It may not reflect every user's experience (or even the most common experience), and must be taken with a grain of salt.

Thanks for reading all the way through! :-)

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