After reading a few reviews, I went out and bought the symphony wireless PC card for my portable and the symphony ISA card for my desktop (for about $200 for both in 1999) in order to be able to share the internet between my desktop and portable using a peer to peer configuration. The installation went easily on both the portable and desktop. I planned to share the internet connection of my desktop USR V.90 56K dialup modem.

One slight subtlety that escaped me initially, was that the proper way was to install the desktop first and get that interface working before getting the portable to work.

With the installation finished the internet sharing was immediately available and flawless. However, getting drive and printer sharing on the desktop was not as easy.

For Drive sharing, I had to wade through a number of the symphony conductor's menus to initialize the remote computer's drive on the network. One annoyance is that if the local computer is ever shut off, then the local computer loses track of how the remote computer was identified and the user on the local computer has to manually re-enable the remote drive for sharing. Kind of a pain.

For printer sharing, the host printer was immediately available to the network upon software installation. The problem was setting up the portable computer to connect to the host printer. Windows ME gave some good hints on how to use the network neighborhood to hook up to the printer and after about 30 minutes of fiddling I got the remote portable to talk to the printer.

During the two years that I have had this system, I have had to un-install the network cards in order to fiddle with some other system. I have noticed that sometimes the un-installation does not go cleanly and there is some elements of the software load that are left behind. This creates problems when I try to install the system later, and it took hours for me to manually clean out the offending partially installed files. It would be nice if symphony were smart enough to un-install the last version before installing the present version.

This system is a mixed bag. It is slow compared to the new systems out there but is reliable. The wireless range is about 40 feet after having to go through one wall, kind of a problem.

It has never crashed my system, but it does tend to forget some network settings that with some minor fiddling I can re-initialize.

Also, beware the flimsy PC card antenna. Too much strain will break it. I know I broke it and it cost $20 to replace from Proxim,

One last piece of advice, get the latest driver from the Proxim web site. I was having some trouble with internet sharing on some of the earlier versions, but the problems disappeared with the later versions.

If you can get a good deal on this network, it is worth the effort but I look forward to the 11 Mbs adapters that are on the market now. If you try to download a large file, you will see what I mean by this statement.

Recommended: Yes