Netgear WAB501 802.11a/b Dual Band Wireless PCCard

Rating:
Summary: Ideal Wi-Fi solution!
Review: I bought this with its matching access point NetGear WAB102 and could not be happier. Set-up took less than five minutes, although configuring the security and access settings took about an hour. The card and access point also include 3-yr warranties, 24/7 support and all that jazz. Excellent for those who don't wanna spend too much time figuring out how to connect Wi-Fi. A co-worker of mine has the Microsoft solution that claims total simplicity and zero uptime, but I fought the NetGear solution much easier.

Rating:
Summary: Ideal Wi-Fi solution!
Review: I bought this with its matching access point NetGear WAB102 and could not be happier. Set-up took less than five minutes, although configuring the security and access settings took about an hour. The card and access point also include 3-yr warranties, 24/7 support and all that jazz. Excellent for those who don't wanna spend too much time figuring out how to connect Wi-Fi. A co-worker of mine has the Microsoft solution that claims total simplicity and zero uptime, but I fought the NetGear solution much easier.

Rating:
Summary: Netgear Equals Superb Service
Review: This holiday season I was a good santa and purchased numerous wireless networking products for my various family members. Sure it was partially a selfish act as I wanted to be able to easily connect when I went to visit, but for the most part it was just an act of giving. I purchased mainly G products and they varied from routers to USB adapters to PC Card adapters. I did also purchase a couple of B products for those in the family that already had some wireless networking products (yes, I know they are backwards compatible but I didn't want to take any chances).

Only two members of the family had installation problems (considering my family is very non-technical I was quite impressed) and those two people both had yet to upgrade to Windows XP SP2. The rest of the family members were up and running within minutes.

As for the couple of family members that did have problems, well they called me first (of course) and I told them to just run back through the installation procedure again. This solved the problem for Uncle Dennis but Grandma Joyce still couldn't get it to work properly. I reluctantly told her to call Netgear's technical support (hey the reviews on Amazon haven't been too pretty for their tech support). I however was quite pleased when an hour later I got an email from Grandma Joyce thanking me for the great gift. I called her back and she told me that after fiddling with the settings with the Netgear people she was up and running within 30 minutes.

Overall, I consider this the ultimate test of product quality and support and I would give Netgear two thumbs up.

I hope this review was helpful to you in putting your mind at ease regarding ease of setup and trust of technical support if needed.