NETGEAR WG511T Super-G Wireless PC Card

I bought this card for an older Dell Inspiron 7000 running Win98 SE.If you buy this card, I recommend that you first go to the [...] website, click on the support tab, choose Downloads, highlight the WG511T Adapter and download the latest firmware driver revision, ver 3.9. When you unzip it, it has the driver file, the user guide and the install guide. Read the Install Guide before you do anything.Don't bother with the bundled CD-ROM. Install the downloaded driver from the setup file and reboot, as it requests. When I ran the driver setup, I got a general protection fault message. I cancelled it and the setup seemed to continue just fine. After reboot the driver database was set up in Windows. At that point, I turned the laptop completely off and then inserted the card.Upon bootup again, Windows found the card and loaded the proper drivers. It again directed a reboot. After that, the card was powered up and began searching for my network.Be sure that you know the proper settings for your router. If it's set not to broadcast your SSID, then you must tell the Netgear card the name of your network in the Netgear Smart Wizard that controls the card. Also, if you're using WPA-PSK security on your router, you have to select the Advanced Security portion of the card setup and manually type in your Shared Key.After I did that, The card immediately locked onto my network. I tried to open an internet connection, but it failed to do so after the "Detecting Proxy Settings" message had been displayed for awhile. I went into Internet Tools on the browser and reset all of the security settings to the defaults, closed the browser and reloaded it. It then found the internet connection and worked flawlessly.I recommend a lot of patience during this whole process. Many of these laptops are older machines with slow processors and operating systems and you have to be sure and wait during the install process. Watch your hard drive indicator light and be sure that everything has finished loading before clicking on the next step.Many reviews on this card have mentioned the confusing blinking lights. They're explained in the User's Manual. Some folks have also mentioned that the card runs hot. Mine seems warm, but not unusually hot.Durability has been questioned by some, but since I just installed mine a few minutes ago, I cannot address that. Hopefully, Netgear has addressed the issue. Thus far I'm extremely pleased with the card.

Bought this card and it worked fine for a couple months. Then it started dropping the connection an average of every couple of minutes. I tried every fix I could find on the internet and nothing. So I tried their email support -- they gave me a bunch of standard cut-and-paste responses until they finally said they were upgrading it to a tier 2 technician, whereupon they quit talking to me (I've yet to hear back from them, despite repeated emails). So I tried calling -- they said it's a software issue and I can either go back to email support (remember: no word for over a month despite repeated emails) or I can get premium support for $32.99 for 15 minutes -- which is asinine since if I use tech support for half an hour, it'd cost me more than what I spent on the card.If you buy this card, pray that nothing ever goes wrong with it -- if it does, you're screwed. For my part, based on this card and pretty much every experience I've had with Netgear, I'm never buying from them again.

I put this card in my wife's Dell Inspiron 4000 Laptop. It replaced a NetGear 802.11b card. Worked great! Then the Blue Screens of Death started. I have tried different combos of using Window's XP to control the card (against recommendations but is more stable) and using different versions of the software for both the card and NetGear's controlling software to no avail. I am now down to the last attempt, using Window's updated software for the card with Windows controlling the card. We'll see.Pros- Incredible range. Shows 2 more networks in my neighborhood then my Centrino notebook. Super fast page loading.Cons- Crashes the computer. It causes memory dumps that corrupts running programs. The NetGear newsgroups show that it is a known problem with their cards and customer service doesn't have a fix. Do the research yourself. One thing that MAY be the reason for the crashes is that some were using an XP upgrade from ME, which this laptop also has.But try it for yourself. It is a great card when its not crashing the system. There are so many different configuations it may work. If not, return it. Good Luck!