I'm a pretty big computer person, and like to play around with computer related stuff. Over the summer we got cable modem (no more stupid AOL) and therefore we needed to network the computers in the house so that everyone could get on the ‘net. We didn't want wires running all over the house though. Our two PCs are at literally geographic opposite ends of the house and so there was a problem. I found the Intel system, but couldn't really talk to anyone with it, because at the time it was fairly new. Overall, the system was tricky to set up (the manual neglects to tell you that you need to set IP addresses for all clients) but once I got it working, it has been good. Also, the cards are USB, which is great because they are 10 MBPS and we have laptops. For us, the system worked out well because we have two laptops (in addition to the two PCs in the house) and one USB “card”. Therefore, if we want to connect one of those two laptops onto the network, (to share files or go on the internet or whatever) it takes two seconds.

I used to run win98 on both computers, but now we have win2k on both computers and the system runs fine. Basically, I set it up to not use the software provided, but rather just use the network cards as simply stand alone network cards. If you install the system in the traditional way, there are lots of tutorials and such (and they give you proxy/security software) but they don't work with win2k, only the network cards (hardware) will work. I don't really have any complaints with this product, and it served as a good primer for me to learn networking. Buy this if you don't like the idea of wires running all over your house, but otherwise it costs too much.


Recommended: Yes