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NETGEAR GA511 Gigabit Ethernet PC Card | List Price: $36.00 Discount Price: $15.99

| Brand: Netgear Binding: Electronics Warranty: 1 year warranty
Features: - PC Card provides Gigabit Ethernet functionality
- Auto-sensing port eliminates need for manual switching
- Smart Wizard makes installation a breeze
- Backed by 1-year warranty
- Device measures 4.38 x 0.56 x 2.13 inches (WxHxD)
Very Good Product [Posted on 2005-08-20] I loved it, It worked very well, I didn't have any problems with the driver, It's very suitable for home & business use
Warning - NDIS 2.0 drivers are NOT supplied despite what box says [Posted on 2005-12-05] You would think that a gigabit PCMCIA card would be just what most Norton GHOST or Altiris users were waiting for...network imaging would now hopefully be complete in a fraction of the usual 100 Mbit time. So I was excited to see on the GA511 box that NDIS 2.0 drivers were included!!! Imagine my surprise when I got home, opened the box, checked the product CD, and FOUND NO NDIS drivers !!! Several inquiries to Netgear Tech Support have confirmed NO NDIS drivers are included and none planned!!! Are they insane? Laptops and drive imaging using products like GHOST were made for each other, and now Netgear won't support NDIS 2.0 for GHOST and similar boot-disk imagers? It's simply false advertising, with no apologies! Avoid this card and wait for Linksys or Belkin to offer the same WITH an NDIS driver.
Works until you try to boot without it. SUCKS [Posted on 2006-01-26] I am shocked that Netgear is providing an old driver (2004) NOT CERTIFIED WITH XP. Bought this Jan 2006. The crashing drove me crazy since nothing identified the driver as the problem until a day later through process of elimination.
Wow. Netgear really blew it on this one.
Not fully tested - should however work [Posted on 2006-05-27] I wanted to elaborate something on Ghost and NDIS drivers. True, the CD didn't have the NDIS driver but there is an alternate source.
I didn't have any difficulty installing this on an XP machine. Speed was ok, but I think this would be as good as it gets considering notebook PC's. For Example I have gotten about 20% of improvement sending data over 10/100 network card which is onboard Intel. However, receiving data was about 50% percent of improvement but I still can't claim for sure.
Regardless it wasn't worth the money (I'll be honest I bought it elsewhere locally).
Much better price and similar performance was Trendnet TEG-PCBUSR Gigabit PCMCIA network adapter. I am still not happy with the speed but like I mentioned, likely as good as it gets. Realtek network cards have been very good to me so no complains there since they are getting their drivers updated frequently, even for DOS.
About the Ghost; Trendnet TEG-PCBUSR offers DOS driver for the Realtek 8169 PCMCIA based network cards. Files required are RTPCI.EXE and RTBIOS.COM that will open up the PCMCIA port in DOS mode. Then load the .dos driver. This """should""" (not tested and I repeat NOT TESTED) work for this card as well, since its Realtek 8169. However, you can't use standard ghost boot disk as loading RTPCI.EXE and RTBIOS.COM through config.sys will crash the PC. Instead one should use something like netbootdisk by easily appending these two files to floppy and autoexec.bat. However, don't expect a great performance, 280 Megabytes per minute at most. Absolute winner (for me) in PCMCIA Ghost performance is Netgear FA511 (380 Megs per minute) but it's also least compatible. FA511 is the same as COMPUSA 10/100 card (They are both ADMTek based adapter and both tested fine) and they have both exceeded the onboard Broadcomm 440 / 330 Megabytes per minute.
Based on that GA511 will likely work with Ghost on older laptops where FA511 I couldn't get to work (3 out of 7 laptops would work with Netgear Fa511). And if you want something to work with every laptop though slow, get Netgear FA411 (16 bit, 40 - 80 megabytes per minute but it won't stall - tested on 9 laptops at least).
All in all, I am planning to purcahse this card to do some more testing.
Works as expected [Posted on 2007-05-09] 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.
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