Rating: 
Summary: A good networking solution
Review: ...But not for the faint of heart.Pros: *cost effective. Uses existing (live!) phone lines. No need to buy cabling or extra hardware to link the two PCs. Alternative networking solutions would have you buy 2 NIC cards, a router, cable, wall jacks and plates. Etc. etc. *Individually packaged. No need to buy 2 more cards when I want to add that 3rd PC. *Time effective. No snaking cables, drilling holes: just plug n' play... *Performs well: download rates on the networked PC were just as fast as the PC connected directly to the modem. *Primary PC (the one connected to the cable modem) gives me an effective switch to limit internet access to the other PC's (just by turning it off). More delicate controls require purchasing additional software from "Fatpipe", conveniently available for download from the network admin menu for the Netgear PA301... Cons: *Icky software installation. Steps to install the drivers, configure the cards etc, required booting each PC 3 times. The older PC was content with this, but the newer one took several errors. Don't remember quite what they were: I ignored them. Seems this was the right thing to do as after the last boot they could talk to each other. Except: *The old internal phone modem on the new PC no longer functioned. After monkeying with settings a while, I finally pulled out the modem card, booted, re-installed the card, let him detect and re-install drivers for the phone modem, all was OK. (whew: I use the phone modem to access restricted systems like the one at work). From what I've read, the main difference between this card and the one 3Com makes is the software; hardware is almost identical (same chips). *Primary PC must be on whenever the other PCs need access to the internet. System info: I installed these on 3 very different PCs: Micron P90, Gateway P133, home built AMD 1gig. All 3 have Win98 Second Edition. The Micron and AMD both have extra phone modems. The AMD has a regular ethernet card to interface with an external cable modem. All are within 50 feet of each other using the primary telephone line. Epilogue: I postponed buying a new surge protector for the old Micron PC (stupid) and an intervening storm fried the PA301 in my son's PC. Still works, but results in an "off the hook" condition for the phone line it uses, rendering it unusable. I'm about to find out how friendly Netgear's warranty process is.
Rating: 
Summary: Like getting two like-ends of a magnet to stick together
Review: Getting the cover off the pc is the easiest part of installing this. Configuring the software (albeit more Win95 than a Netgear issue) was much more challenging, and I never could get W95 with this card to talk to a W98 with the PA101 (USB). The included documentation assumes all goes well, so I had to take advantage of Netgear's advertised free 24x7 support, and I think I waited that long in total for the "next available technician". One tech I did finally talk to indicated it really should be as easy as installing the card and ensuring it is configured for netbeui. I couldn't agree with him more - it should be that easy - but it never was. Removing the card was just as easy as installing it. Stay away unless you're a network adapter genius, and if you are, you probably already have ethernet running too smoothly to want to replace it. I didn't want to wire my house, but could have in much less time than I spent with this product and Netgear technical support.
Rating: 
Summary: Worked fine
Review: I already had a phoneline network set up using a product from a different vendor (Linksys). Inserted the PCI card, turned on the computer, and the product installed itself and reconfigured my Windows 98 settings to allow file sharing automatically. Whatever problems I had were not due to this installation, but to the way the Linksys router assigned internet addresses. The Linksys technical support team (for the router) was able and willing to fix the internet address issues on this computer, even though I used a Netgear connector.
Rating:
Summary: Netgear Phoneline PCIcard
Review: I am now on the third PA-301 Phoneline card and found out how poorly made this product is. The first two cards lasted about 5 months before one of them stopped working. I tried unsucessfully to get a replacement from Netgear under warrenty but that was nixed. I bought an additional card since only one card does me no good. The second card lasted two weeks before it failed to link with my computer (AMD K6 III 400) I called netgear and was given the runaround that I needed to upgrade my system from WIN 98 SE to WIN ME. I am fairly computer savey and informed the technician over the phone that the card was working at one time but stopped working shortly there after with no changes made to my computers. Again failed to have netgear replace card under warrenty. I have since given up on the phone line network cards as well as Netgear since there lack of honoring their warrenty. I am now using ethernet cards and router to connect to cable modem. This product is not worth the hastle to use. If only one card had failed and if Netgear had honored their warrenty I might have a higher opinion of the product. In all fairness...the cards did work as advertised for networking and internet sharing but only for a short period of time. For networking a few computers that are near each other you can not beat ethernet cards and a switch or router. Good Luck if you purchase this product.
Rating:
Summary: 30 HOURS OF HEADACHES!!
Review: I bought two of these cards for a client of mine. He wanted me to set them up on a computer with Win98SE, and another one with WinME. Needless to say, 5 visits and 30 hours later, they STILL don't work. I was able to successfully have the cards see each other and was surfing the net on the client for about an hour, then the network was down. The software included is useless unless you have Windows 95, or Windows 98, FIRST edition. I called Netgear, and they said that the software is incompatible with Windows 98 SE and up, and that no update or alternative was available. One of the cards started coming up as a Broadcom iLine 10 NIC, which is the chipset on the card. I exchanged it with a new one with Amazon, and it worked fine.. until the OTHER ONE had the same problem. Now the card is out of the Win98SE machine, yet it's still detecting a PCI Ethernet Controller! WTF? Anyway, I'm sending these (...) cards back to Amazon for good. Next time, I should look at more than the price of a NIC. And I am DEFINITELY not buying from Netgear again; I waited an hour on hold 3 separate times, only to get a clueless foreigner.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent product
Review: I bought two of these cards to network both my children's computers which sit in each of their bedrooms at one end of the house. The card physically is very easy to install, provided you have an empty PCI slot (if not, then use PA-101 USB adapter). One computer runs W98SE, and the second runs ME. The driver CD works fine, even better with ME since driver installs automatically. It plugs into any working phone jack, and you're all networked and ready to surf the net. Everything needed is included in the package. You can be on line and still use your phone without any degradation in either signal. The 10X connection is quite fast and not noticeably different than your 10/100 wired ethernet connection. I have a broadband cable modem, hooked to my router. One of my router's LAN ports is hooked a phoneline bridge (Netgear PE102, another great product), and the bridge to a phone jack. I definitely recommend this card, with a bridge, if you want to set up a home phoneline network.
Rating:
Summary: Stay away from this card!
Review: I bought two of these in September 2001, thinking to network multiple PCs and share a broadband connection. Installation was a pain, requiring me to pin an IRQ in the BIOS for a Windows Me machine. The board ran-- for one day-- and then died. I got the other one working intermittently until I upgraded to Windows XP. Under XP, for one glorius month, everything worked great. In January, my machine locked up and the board stopped working. I tried everything, including doing a complete reinstall of Windows 95 on a spare machine, to determine if it was XP. It wasn't. Neither board worked on a simple Windows 95 setup. I have a computer background and I even tried debugging the device driver initialization before determining that the boards were fried. Buy another vendor's product.
Rating:
Summary: Not worth the eventual frustration.
Review: I had written a prior review last March with 5 stars, and it came back to bite me. I had bought 2 of these in April 2002, and they worked great for just about a year. Shortly after I wrote my first review, one just died completely, and about a month later the second one started acting up. Other reviewers have had the same problem with it, and I wouldn't have normally cared, except the aggravation I went through with Netgear. Their tech support at several levels was a total waste of time (several hours and days). Granted, they were all polite on the phone, but it seemed they have a "pre-programmed/robotic" response and trouble shooting steps, which had me going in circles over and over again. Never did any one ever even acknowledge that the card could actually have "died", and thus did not want to stand by their so called "life time warranty". I could only blame myself for going through that tech support charade. I have since abandoned phoneline networking, in favor of wireless. I have put Netgear in the same "outcast" category as Linksys,... and Hail to (that's how I spell networking relief) D-L-I-N-K.
Rating:
Summary: Having problems with online also
Review: I have a small office networked with these cards. Works fine for printer and file sharing. Cannot get it to share online connection. What really has me puzzled though is the fact I had two of the computers at my house networked with the same cards and they could share the connection.
Rating:
Summary: Works well for me!
Review: I have an ICS setup with DSL that is working fine with both PA-301 and PA-101 hardware. Everything works, including ping and friends. I'm using both TCP/IP and NetBEUI on the PhoneLine network. What took me a long time to figure out was the connection sharing stuff, but my problems with that had nothing to do with the PhoneLine setup. I have learned some things from the dslreports.com site and the practicallynetworked.com site. My situation was complicated by the need for PPPoE, understanding that that applied ONLY to the gateway machine, and then getting DNS support working. Numeric ping worked well before ping by name! NetGear support has been very good, willing to support most anything.
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