NETGEAR GA511 Gigabit Ethernet PC Card

I have always been happy with Netgear products. With this one, however, I believe they have the drivers mixed up by name from what I have read. My problem with this one is my Compaq Presario 12XL401 would not recognize it. As I said, subsequent reading has shown others have experienced the same problem and it seems to be with the drivers. I was unable to get it to work. Amazon.com was very quick to issue a RMA Number and upon receipt, quickly processed a refund. I have nothing negative to say about the product nor the merchant. I never fear to do business with Netgear or Amazon.com.

First, make sure you get the newest drivers from the RealTek website (NOT the Netgear website--they won't work on XP). It is the RTL8169 driver and it is located under PCI devices on the websiteAfter installing the RealTek drivers and removing the Netgear drivers, the card started working fine and much better than the internal card on my old laptop. I haven't had the chance to run cable to my GbE switch, but I'll be happy as long as its faster than FE (although I don't expect much more than the 300 or so mbps limited by the Cardbus port). Definitely worth the 6 dollars for a refurbished one

This is probably the only Gigabit card for PCMCIA you'll ever find without breaking your wallet. It works well, the only downside is the Realtek chipset. Performance will never be on-par with the better chips, but for the cost, who cares.

This card was purchased several years ago when laptop computers didn't have built-in wifi. If worked well and may be useful if your on-board wifi transmitter fails.

This card works very well. I purchased the card for two reasons: 1) faster internet access than the wireless adapter I have and 2) to enable faster movement of files from the laptop to my home server using Gig-E. My laptop is running WinXP and the card installed without any problems. One of the easiest installs I have ever done.

I purchased this network card to install into an old Dell laptop with the intention of turning the laptop into an internet gateway/router. This network card worked great and was compatible with all linux/router distributions that I tried.

Good card

I bought this card for use with a linux laptop (Dell Inspiron 5100). And it worked right out of the box. I am running Fedora Core 6. Keep in mind that you wont be able to get the full gigabit speeds with a PCMCIA card. My cursory testing got me around 380Mbps.