Last Fall I had an issue. We had moved into our new house, but it was a pretty old house though and it had an addition. The house layout was the shape of an L, which made wiring the house for internet a big issue. There weren't really any good areas to run the cable and in order to get good wireless range, I had to put the router in one of the worst possible spots in the house for wired connectivity. It left only my PS2 with a wired connection to the internet and possibly a laptop on the dining room table. It also meant that I had to make my desktop upstairs wireless because there was no easy way to run the ethernet cable upstairs without it looking awful. So with the need for a printer growing with each day, I took a trip down to Staples to get the cheapest PCI wireless card I could find. Linksys was having a sale at $40 for their wireless card, but Netgear's was $10 cheaper. So I did what any ex-Staples employee shouldn't do, I asked the business machines rep how compatible these cards were to a Linksys wireless router. He gave me some BS about owning a Netgear wireless card and a Linksys router himself and that he had no trouble at all. I knew it was BS because I used to be a Staples Business Machines Associate for the summer after I graduated high school and know that you say anything just to get the customer to leave you alone. But I bought the excuse anyway. Usually I do more research, but I had a computer that couldn't connect to the Internet! That's just not acceptable in my household.


Features

Not much in the features category here. It's your typical run of the mill PCI wireless ethernet card for your desktop. The WG311 runs on both 802.11 b/g speeds and is capable of a max speed of up to 54Mbps at a frequency of 2.4GHz. It uses most common forms of encryption including 128-bit WEP.

System Requirements:
Pentium III - I'd expect this would run on a Pentium II class, but would be slow
Free PCI Slot - The only true requirement in the list
20MB of Hard Drive space - This is not really required if you have XP, but it helps if you want to install anything on the CD
Windows 98, ME, 2000, or XP - Again, not required since I can get it to work easily on many Linux Distributions


Performance

The performance was acceptable on this machine. I don't know if I had something connected wrong or whether my machine was creating a lot of overhead, but I was barely able to transfer files faster than 100K/s, even internally within in the house at first. When I switched to my Netgear Router it began to come together a little bit better and I saw more of a consistent and faster signal. The interference does play a little bit of a role in the transmission speed. Many of the power cords run close to the antenna as I have little choice in the matter. In addition, there's a small 15" TV that sits above my tower and another 27" TV that resides almost in between the router and the card downstairs. When the bigger TV is on my connection speed drops to 75K/s or lower. It's just about that bad when I'm drawing a lot of juice from the outlet as well like when I have the fan running in the window adjacent to the computer. Overall, I guess the performance it acceptable given the configuration of my house and all the mitigating factors, but I would have expected more.


Software

The Netgear WG311 network card comes with a CD with the card's drivers and the wireless management utility that we all know and love. Now they say that you absolutely must install the software before plugging in the card. This isn't exactly true as I found out this week. I ended up reformatting my Windows XP partition to NTFS (who knew that Windows XP Pro could run on Fat32?) which involved a complete re-installation of everything. Long story short, all I needed the CD for were the drivers in \drivers\winxp and I was all set. Now if I wanted to configure my WEP encryption, I needed to install the utility, which I did. But it's not required if you have a non-authenticated wireless connection.

Fans of my computer reviews know where I stand on Netgear's software. It's ugly and should be controlled through a common interface in Windows. But it's also easy to install, it doesn't leave a big footprint, and it makes connecting to another wireless router really easy. So it works for me even if it adds another 5-10 seconds to my boot up time.


Compatibility

The Netgear WG311 network card has a lot of compatibility. While I have seen complaints on message boards about the compatibility with Windows XP Home SP2, I run Windows XP Professional with all the latest updates. I haven't seen any problems connecting to my router at all. I even switched routers and the software utility handled that well, but mostly because I was switching to a Netgear router. Still, this wireless card had no problems interacting with my Linksys router. It couldn't import all the settings for connecting to the router up front because it was Linksys, but I was pretty familiar with my setup so I could easily fill in all the details.

As far as operating systems go, the only Windows machine I tried this card with was Windows XP Professional and it works great. I do have another partition setup for Linux. Since last Fall, I've had Ubuntu Breezy Badger, SuSe 9.2 and 10, and Knoppix 4.0.2 all running or at least booted at one point. None of these distributions gave me any trouble, surprisingly. I'd suspect any major distribution of Linux would be able to recognize this card whether it's the latest version of Fedora, Debian, or Mandriva.


Durability

This is my biggest concern right here. While the card fit snugly into the PCI slot in my 5 year old ASUS P4T motherboard, the antenna's construction doesn't exactly fill me with confidence. The antenna screws into a tiny mount point on the face of the card. This mount point looks extremely fragile, especially the pin the sticks out of it. I'd look past that if I could safely say that I won't be replacing the antenna anytime soon. Unfortunately, I don't have that confidence. After installing my DVD Burner the other week, I noticed that the antenna was beginning to show signs of wear. Only after 6 months you say? You also have to keep in mind, I hadn't touched the antenna at all since I installed it. It's not like I go behind my desktop on a regular basis. Had I screwed it in wrong? Had one of the cats stepped on it? I don't know. But what I do know is that one misstep by me during another upgrade could spell doom for the antenna. That really stinks. With that kind of durability, it'll be lucky to see another Christmas or even Halloween for that matter.


Conclusion

Overall it's a decent card, but my concerns are more with its durability. With hardware prices these days, I'd expect to pay $10-$15 for this card tops. And with all the rebates that fly around these days, I'd rather take my chances with a Linksys card simply with the greater possibility of having a more durable antenna. Performance-wise it's acceptable, but it helps to have a Netgear product on the other end. Would I recommend this product to other people? Not really. The only exception is if they can get it at a good price. For me, $30 was just too expensive for a card that might not outlive my PC.

Recommended: No