Installing the PC-CARD was easy. Don't follow the manual if you're on NT - just install the driver, reboot and plug the card in. It works great from there.

Only minus (why I only give it 4 stars) is that it seems to suddently drop the communication, even when there is full signal. Which high-bandwidth requirements, I have to rescan for the Access Point about every 5th minut - as the Tx and Rx goes to zero.

Which normal use (surfing, network stuff etc) I haven't seen this problem yet.

As an Electrical Engineer, RF systems specialist, and qualified AIS consultant, I was confident about using this product, and expected it to work well. WRONG.

Simply look around the internet a bit, you'll find TONS of people having problems with these things.

I spent 2 hours on the phone with D-Link technical support. Waste of time. The technician hadn't a clue how to assist. After spending a lot of time, and getting frankly awful performance from these cards, I gave up and put them on the shelf.

Save your money, find a better product. These things just aren't ready for prime time.

I'm really pleased to have the internet available all over the house.

However, WinXP users will need to carefully select the correct driver from dlink's ftp site (the link mentioned in a previous review is *still* not corrected as I write this) in order to avoid several hours of unecessary frustration.

Once up and running, the DWL650 works like most other 802.11b wireless products on the market today (variable range and consistency given different installation environments).

A decent card to use if only using Windows 2000 or another previous version of Windows.

If you are thinking about switching to a wireless system it would be a good idea to go the manfacturer's website and download all the latest software and driver's before you install the wireless system. Especially if you are going to use wireless only. Luckily I had a desktop computer connected to the wireless router's port via a CAT 5 cable which allowed me to download the drivers I needed to correct the issues and get it working. Once it was working I was quite happy.

Finally, the antenna on the D-Link feels flimsy. I had the feeling that if I bumped it the wrong way (while balancing my notebook on my lap), it might snap off. So every time I wasn't using the card I was careful to take it out of the computer, which is a hassle.

But as this was my first hands-on experience with wireless LAN's, I got a little bit disappointed when doing some benchmarks. First, I cant get more than about 5-6mbit. Secondly, my CPU-usage goes up to about 80% when transfering data (without WEP enabled). After some investigation on the net I found that a maximum speed of 5-6mbit is what you should expect.

Im really disappointed of the CPU-utilization. On my system I get about 10% CPU-usage with every 10mbit on my 100mbit NIC. Over wireless I get over 10% of CPU-utilization for every 1mbit.

Surfin the web and so on works nicely. But watching a highresolution movie is a no no because of the CPU-utilization.
My system: Dell Inspiron 8100 1.13GHz P3 WinXP

The drivers from the website installed with no problem once I inserted the card into the slot. XP did its thing, and even connnected me to the access point, showing signal strength and all the good stuff. Yet it was completely unable to obtain the IP from the DHCP server, no matter what I tried. Setting the IP manually did not establish the network connection either. As a last resort, I installed the "drivers" from the CD that came with it (they did not have XP drivers, only 2000), which is actually a setup program that copies a bunch of files to the harddrive, including a control applet (made for 2000). Inside that applet (that duplicates a lot of XP features) I found out that my encryption is set to 64-bit, while in XP dialogs it is shown as disabled. I knew that my access point had its encryption disabled, so once I killed it here and hit apply, the card reset and the IP was obtained.
Signal strength is decent, the connection stayed at 11Mbps at all times, so the only real bummer is the software that is causing the difficulties in setup.

In a Toshiba Tecra 730 XCDT running Win98 1st Ed., the card drivers were reported to be improperly installed by the OS. I had my PC card slot configured as PCMCIA during first install. After downloading the latest drivers found on the company's web site and installing the latest Win98 network driver patches from MS; I still had no success.

After, on a lark, switching the PC card slot to cardbus/16bit; the PC card was located and started running without an issue.

Right now I have the remote PC located four rooms and one floor away from the D-Link acces point and get, on the average, 85% signal strength. Also, I tested the connection speed and average approximately 5 to 8 Mbit/sec speeds.

Good product for the price. Linksys is much better.