Picked up another one to see if I had gotten a lemon the 1st time and it seems to work just fine with no drops. I've return the lemon and will keep you posted.

This product is pretty much "plug and play." I did have to call linksys technical support. The manual that comes with the card does not tell you but when you install this card you must disable all other network cards. Once this is done click on the linksys wireless icon and click connect. You must click connect. XP will show the card enable, however it will show that you do not have a wireless connection unless you click connect.

The range on this card could be better, however overall it does fairly well. I reside in a two story 3000 square foot house, 1500 each floor. The wireless access unit is on the second floor at the furthest end of the house. Signal fades at the other end of the house(with a couple of doors closed)on the first floor. Forget about it working on the first floor. If linksys could improve the range this would easily be a five star product. But for the costs it is hard to complain.

Some people said that they had problems installing this device on XP or some other Wintel platform unless they upgraded the firmware...I didn't. It worked with every OS I've tried (win2k pro and server, winxp home and pro, winME). Maybe the older models needed a firmware upgrade...who knows?

I did however have a problem installing this on redhat 7.2. Supposedly this is one of the cards that is autodetected by PCMCIA card services in that release...but oh well. Took me quite a while to get it working. At least I've got a traditional ethernet card built-in to my notebook too, so that I could get online and look around. Linksys support for the open source movement is suprisingly limited compared to other card manufacturers.

If you are an open source freak, go with an orinoco or lucent -- those have always worked right off the bat for me in mandrakes and redhats.

Otherwise linksys is great! And the wireless 4-port DSL/cable router is great in conjunction with this!

Note: people, please encrypt your wireless networks. It's generally very easy to do and can prevent SERIOUS damage to your networks.

I am thoroughly satisfied with the stability of the connection and its throughput. In my previous experience with wireless network cards, I had difficulty connecting through walls, and the further I got from the wireless access point my bandwidth dropped markedly. Although I do find that obstacles between my new Linksys card, and the wireless access point does slow my connection minimally, I have not noticed difficulty maintaining a connection. For this I am ecstatic!

One thing that I did have trouble with was installing this card. Although I am no networking genius, I do have multiple high-end computing certifications in both networking and programming. Before installing this card, I skimmed through the installation guide and then proceeded to install the PC card and drivers. Following the directions to the T, bad move, caused me to install the wrong driver on my system (Win2K on an HP Pavilion laptop). It was easy for me to solve the installation issue, but I had to reboot my machine, which made the entire process that much longer.

In all, I am satisfied with the Linksys WPC11 Wireless Network PC Card's performance, but less than satisfied with the ease of its installation. I definitely recommend this product, but again, watch out for installation troubles. Hope this helps, and good luck.

Setup was easy, and reception from the wireless router covers my house. I could even carry my laptop outside on my front lawn and surf the net. It doesn't get the advertised distances, but seems OK for my purposes (around a 50 foot radius from the router). Some people have said the netgear card is better, but I have had no problems. It is important to play around with the location of the router. A slightly different router spot will dramatically improve the range of the card.

Overall, because of the range I'll have to give this 4 stars, but this is a very good product and works fine with Win 98.

I even got past the problems with the XP install and it works like a charm sitting right by the hub.

This card needs some more boost.....

Just a note - the drivers in the CD does not have Win XP driver - so you have to download the XP driver from the website. Don't hesitate to call tech support - they will walk you through installation of the drivers and configuration of the IP and DNS address.

First, be sure that you get v3.0 of this card. v1.0 has very limited range even in ideal circumstances. It also has problems connecting to their WUSB11 in Ad-Hoc mode, so if you are building an "ad-hoc" network, be sure to get 2.5 or 3.0. The range on v2.5 and v3.0 also seems to be much better.

I also have to defend Linksys tech support. I had problems with my 1.0 card, and tech support was quite helpful. I know other folks had different experiences, but mine was fine. They acknowledged when they could not solve the problem and took the card back

Now, on to 3.0. ***Do not, under any circumstances, allow the config program to update your firmware.*** This is a flaky process, and if it hangs, the card becomes useless. The story behind the firmware update seems to be this: v3.0 is preloaded with firmware to support Windows XP. If you have Windows 2000 (and possibly others), the config program tries to "downgrade" your firmware to an earlier version. When I allowed it to do this, it hung in the middle. Nothing I could do made my machine (or several other laptops) recognize the card after that. Linksys exchanged the card no problem, and when I installed the next card I simply said no the firmware upgrade. Now everything works and I get a good, string signal an excellent range.

Bottom line:
Linksys has lots of kinks to work out of their setup, drivers, documentation, and support, but once you get this card working, it works well. And the problems I had and others have experienced do not seem to happen to every user, so you may actually be lucky enough to have a completely smooth install and be left wondering what we are all griping about.

Good luck!

I returned the linksys card and bought a Netgear instead. works much better.

Unless you use your wireless PC card close to the base (w/o any wall or door in between), stay away from this card...

Install was a bit tricky with Windows 98 because I did not have the original OS cd, but Windows 2000 Professional worked with no problems.

I highly reccomend this product!