Electronics: Buy Linksys WPC11 Wireless PC Card Online

Average Rating:

Windows ME:

My first few installation attempts were on WinME. The driver installer, on the provided Linksys CD, had problems locating the necessary files it needed to install. The CD was either missing files or the installer was looking in the incorrect folders. Either way, pretty sloppy. Downloading the latest drivers from linksys.com fixed the installation problems. However, I was unable to get the card to make the wireless link with the access point.

Windows 2000:

Frustrated, I switched to the OS I should have installed it on in the first place, Win2k, where the drivers installed with no problems. However, again the card was unable to link with the router.

User Manual:

The manual supplied with the card, at first glance, looks promising. Flipping through, you see quite a few screenshots of their configuration utility (supplied on the CD) and a lot of text. However, I was disappointed and confused once I dug in. The text did little more than label the different configuration utility views and properties in each screenshot, providing little or no explanation for what the setting does and why. I could not even locate an explanation for what the LED's on the PCMCIA card indicated.

The most frustrating aspect of the user manual was the section I needed the most: troubleshooting. The troubleshooting section was a whopping two pages (not front and back) and consisted of three questions.

Linksys Technical Support:

Linksys has 7-day tech support, so I was able to contact them on a Sunday, which was nice. The quality of their technicians is what you would expect - good and bad. I first spoke with a guy for 30 minutes who was little help and, as I later found out, actually gave me some incorrect information. I called back later and managed to get a hold of one helpful technician that took literally 2 minutes to determine the problem and step me through fixing it. I also asked a few basic questions that the manual couldn't answer and the technician acknowledged that the user manual was "embarrassing" and "missing critical setup information".

Summary:

The card works great! While the router sits in my basement, I tote my laptop around the house and am able to work in the living room, back patio, on the 2nd story, etc, and the download/upload speeds are as fast as my desktop, which is cabled directly to the router. Despite the problems I had, I would still recommend the card. If you have trouble configuring it, I would seriously advise skipping the manual and just calling Linksys tech support.

Installation was never a problem, although you may want to reboot your machine after setting up all the details like
channel, SSID, etc, even if your machine doesn't ask you to. I'd recommend using the device manager to configure the card,
never use the configuration utility that comes with the card
(floppy disk #2). It sucks!
I have been able to get about 5.0 MBps between my machines consistently (pretty consistent with practicallynetworked.com's
reviews). The only other product in the market with better bandwidth is Cisco's Aironet, which supposedly gives you 6+ MBps
but costs almost twice as much. And
since my high-speed internet connection is not going to be 5 MBps in the near future, I can use these cards for a while.
Technical support sucks bigtime, tho...as other reviewers have mentioned. One of my cards stopped working and I had to wait for
40 mins to get a hold of a live person...he sent me an RMA form my email pretty promptly and asked me to return the card. They replaced it.
He even told me the best way to get in touch with tech support quickly was call them up after 10:00 pm
PST. The load is low that time of the day, he said.
Some tips while setting up your wireless home network.
- two cards work pretty well in the ad-hoc mode. Don't buy the access point unless you really need to.
- If you use Windows Se or Me as the main computer connected to the internet, you have no choice but to use ICS, which works like a charm.
With this config, use ZoneAlarm as the firewall if you need one. If you're main machine has Win2k Server, you can use either ICS or NAT.
If you use NAT, ZoneAlarm will block outgoing access from other local machines on the wireless network. So either buy ZoneAlarm Pro
or use Tiny Software's Personal firewall which works with NAT, but not with ICS (this is the most configurable and user-friendly firewall I've seen so far
that you don't have to pay for).
- Use Qcheck (available at www.qcheck.net) to measure throughput between machines so you can check out the range and other parameters.
- One advantage of using ICS and ZoneAlarm is that you can run a VPN client to your office network from any of the local machines while the main machine
can surf the web without knowing about the VPN tunnel. I haven't been able to do that with NAT and Tiny firewall.

- Buy the wdt11 if you need to install the cards in a desktop. Don't get any other generic pcmcia adapters. I got one for a good price and
then realized that it was a ISA-Pcmcia adapter and the max throughput it supported was 5 MBps. Of course, I can't go higher than 5 MBps
anyway but why not get a tested card from the same company for a couple of bucks more?

So, overall the cards are good, it's a good deal but the tech support is almost non-existent.