I decided to buy the Orinoco PC LAN card for a very specific reason. I wanted to get wireless internet access for my Apple PowerBook 3400 (which is not Airport-card ready). I read a magazine review which reported that the Orinoco Silver/Gold cards communicated via the IEEE 802.11b standard and would communicate with the Apple Airport Base Station. The difference between the Silver and Gold is the degree of encryption, and I would have been fine with either card, but I went with the Gold card because the price difference was only $15. Other epinion reviews expand on this issue further, so I won't talk about it here.

From the orinocowireless.com web site I downloaded the "latest" Mac drivers (version 6.00.4). To me the drivers we poorly written in terms of the interface and ease of use. Every change made to the settings required you to restart the machine. This slowed the configuration process greatly. Initially, I was unable to connect to my Base Station. Documentation that came with the drivers were unhelpful and poorly written for the Mac.

I called Orinoco tech support. I was able to get through to a person, but unfortunately they were not Mac savvy and could not help. I wish these companies would give their tech support people the adequate training. I know tech support is a tough thankless job, but it's only made worse when you are put on the phone lines without getting the right training to help the people that are calling.

So then I went the Apple support web site for help. Under the discussion of Airports, I found a discussion topic regarding Orinoco cards/drivers. Thank goodness for this discussion group, because I learned that Orinoco quietly released updated Mac drivers for the Silver/Gold cards (version 6.1) elsewhere on their web site. This fact was not mentioned by their tech support nor web site.

After downloading the updated drivers, I was able to get the card to communicate with the Base Station. Once again however the instruction provided were scant and I had to rely on the experts in the Apple discussion group to show me the way. To make a long story short, my problem was getting the encryption to work b/w the card and Base Station which required extra instructions provided by the discussion group. I just wish Orinioco provided this info up front.

Everything is working now. In day-to-day use the realistic range of the card is about 50-75 feet in an average home.

Recommended: Yes