Rating: 
Summary: Another great product from NetGear
Review: NetGear makes the best wireless products hands down. I used to have the LinkSys WMP11 wich was unreliable. now I bought this card with the MR814 Wireless router works seamlessly together for seamless wireless connectivity. I have had no problems at all with this and I have owned it for about 4 months now. It is very easy to install. It is a must have for all wireless networks.
Rating: 
Summary: Continual pain
Review: Never worked properly in windows 2000, but that could be due to something else. However:If you have this MA311 card in a Windows 2000 computer then upgrade to XP, IT WILL NOT WORK! I have tried this process on two separate PCs; the card is then unusable in that machine afterwards, no amount of changing PCI slots, un/reinstalling drivers helps, you just various annoying windows errors such as 'driver installation was unsuccessful'. Tech support are quite useless and sound very much like they're reading from a script, mainly because that's exactly what they're doing.
Rating:
Summary: Works Great.... =W2K Pro SP5=
Review: people must know know how to work a wireless network
i installed this without any problems be sure to install the drivers first....
NetGear & Linksys Rocks dude....
Rating:
Summary: Continual pain
Review: Since I've put this into my PC, I've broken 3 keyboards through frustration. On top of list price its cost me ?3000 in anger management courses! hehe (joke)
However, absolutely useless with Win2000, it makes no sense. Installing the drivers before you put the card in your pc is also bizarre.
Reverted back to an old netgear MA101, which doesnt let me see my network, but lets me use the net through our gateway. Odd, but it does me for what i need. Regards
James
UK
Rating: 
Summary: MA311 - Nice as a cosmetic tail - but thats about it
Review: Since I've put this into my PC, I've broken 3 keyboards through frustration. On top of list price its cost me £3000 in anger management courses! hehe (joke)
However, absolutely useless with Win2000, it makes no sense. Installing the drivers before you put the card in your pc is also bizarre.
Reverted back to an old netgear MA101, which doesnt let me see my network, but lets me use the net through our gateway. Odd, but it does me for what i need. Regards
James
UK
Rating: 
Summary: Lousy Software & Support, Great Hardware
Review: Software & support 1 star, card 5 stars. I have two of these, and they work quite well with M$ generic drivers for Windows 2000 & XP, and Linux Orinoco drivers. Netgear's own software is lousy on Windows- aside from the installer corrupting my registry once and putting a bunch of icons on my desktop, it doesn't add anything beyond Microsoft's. Their drivers don't even exist for Linux, but since they use a generic chipset, most distributions can support it. Their telephone support doesn't exist, and it is nearly impossible to find any helpful information on the MA311 on their website. Those negatives aside, the card works quite well, which is the most important issue for me. If you're technically competent and don't need any handholding, this isn't a bad card.
Rating:
Summary: Lousy Software & Support, Great Hardware
Review: Software & support 1 star, card 5 stars. I have two of these, and they work quite well with M$ generic drivers for Windows 2000 & XP, and Linux Orinoco drivers. Netgear's own software is lousy on Windows- aside from the installer corrupting my registry once and putting a bunch of icons on my desktop, it doesn't add anything beyond Microsoft's. Their drivers don't even exist for Linux, but since they use a generic chipset, most distributions can support it. Their telephone support doesn't exist, and it is nearly impossible to find any helpful information on the MA311 on their website. Those negatives aside, the card works quite well, which is the most important issue for me. If you're technically competent and don't need any handholding, this isn't a bad card.
Rating:
Summary: Why ship trash?
Review: Take a look at Netgear's knowledgebase and you'll see that some of these adapters are sent out misconfigured--you need to use a driver for the MA312 instead of the MA311. I'm not sure if that's the problem with mine--still waiting after an hour in the support queue. And this is the second call. Email also went unanswered. I love Netgear products and always buy them over other companies networking products but this is too much. They are forcing me to reinstall the card before they'll issue an RMA. This is despite my trying for three hours, downloading the latest drivers and everything else in their knowledgebase. (I'm a software developer so I do have some inkling of what I'm doing.)
Rating:
Summary: locks up under linux
Review: Talking to the MR814 router it hangs on large outgoing data transfers after 70-80 Megs, and won't do anything at all until the machine is power-cycled. Works fine for web-surfing and downloads, but don't expect to do backups through it.
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.
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