Customer Reviews

D-Link DWL-G630 Wireless Cardbus Adapter, 802.11g, 54Mbps

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

I agree with several other reviews here that the card is bad. But, if you had bought it and don't want to spend money returnig it, some tweaking would make it work good! A good product should be real plug and play but this is not!!

I bought it as a router and pc card (both D-link 802.11g) set to use at home. I have my desktop connected by cable to the router and my laptop connecting wirelessly. Installation was a snap for both the router and the card and they worked fine and I was able to browse and share files between both the computers - all at good speed.

Trouble started when I went to work with my laptop or when I used laptop on its battery. The card took a long time to recognize the network and the computer kept saying 'cound not connect to network drives'.

The other problem was that my battery drained very fast. So fast to the extent that some times just booting up and reading my emails will already have used up 75% battery!!

Minor trouble; the D-link utility does the exact samething that Windows XP wireless connection manager does. However, there is no (easy) way to disable the utility from loading. Even if you use windows XP to configure wireless connections, the D-link utility sits there and does nothing.

Solutions:
1. You can prevent the D-link utility from loading and this improves performance - makes connections quicker actually. Click Start..Run.. ; Type 'msconfig' and click OK. In the window that appears click the 'Startup' tab; You will see a long list of programs that are enabled at start up. Uncheck 'airplus.exe' and 'reg.exe' both of which run from the D-link installation directory.

2. To conserve battery, Right click the wireless connection icon on the tray; click status... click Properties... Click 'configure' right next to the D-link airplus g card's name. Go to the advanced tab and choose 'powersavemode' from the list..choose property 'normal' or 'maximum' to save your battery.

These two actions make a card actually work better than using D-link's utility (Do all tweaking at your own risk! It worked for me, but, cannot guarantee it'll work for you w/o causing any trouble). Good luck!!

Although the device appears to operate just fine as far as the network, speed, and range is concerned, the card has a serious problem running on laptops under Windows XP.

I spoke today (April 26, 2004) with D-Link customer service, and they said that the card is "new" and may still have driver issues. Also, they are aware that under Windows XP, the card is unable to wake up after standby/hibernation. This is what I experienced with my Thinkpad laptop. So the card installs OK and operates correctly....but the moment the laptop goes into standby the card will turn off, and then when the rest of the laptop wakes up the card will not. I have to reboot to wake it up. The kind telephone representative I spoke with was hopeful about a driver fix soon. I am not sure if the problem is only for some brands of laptops or all of them under Windows XP. I think I will return my card for another brand with better drivers.

Considerably better than D-Link router products. It's amazing, but it did not want to work well with D-Link router (presumebly faulty) but works excellent with Belkin products. Its driver software may be a little annoying. When the computer starts, XP loads its own driver for this card; then the program that comes with this card unloads the XP driver and then then loads it back again. So the connection is established, broken and then again re-established. It works fine otherwise.

I recently bought D-links DI-514 wireless router and the AirPlus G DWL-G630 wireless pc-card and am not happy with either. The router just stops broadcasting frequently and I have to restart it. The wireless card has been a royal pain. DO NOT BUY this card if you have a Compaq Presario laptop. They are not compatible. I tried everything Dlink tech support suggested including doing a complete fresh reinstall of windows XP (!) and trying a replacement card and my computer still locks up. From my reading of forums on the internet, D-links wireless cards seems to work well on some computer brands and not others. You see posts where people have the same card working great on one laptop and freezing up another one. Amusingly, when I was explaining to the level 2 tech at Dlink that my previous Orinico wireless card worked perfectly for 3 years he said that I should have hung onto that card because that is what he currently uses! Dlinks level 2 tech doesn't even use this shoddy product!! Nor did they have an explanation why their drivers STILL are not windows XP certified. Come on, XP has been out for years and Dlink just hasn't gotten around to it yet (or more likely its just not certifiable)??? If you are still keen on getting the card, save yourself the hassle and check the forums first (www.dslreports.com)to see if others with your computer brand are having problems.

I purchased this from [...]about 1 year now. I'm using Windows 2000 Professional. The card worked fine for the first week. But ever since, I get "poor" connections, or multiple annoying interruptions. It absolutely drives you crazy. Dial up works better. Its suppose to give you 54Mbps, but the highest I get is 36Mbps from my 108Mbps router. I have tried the tech support, but it was futile. I was hanged up upon twice, and really got nowhere from them. They only have 1 driver for this card that is almost 2 years old. They finally said sent it back to us at your expense, and we will send you a refurbished one. That is horrible. I tossed the card in garbage can. I purchased LinkSYS and it works like it should.

Bottom line, don't waste your money on this product.

I couldn't figure out why my Thinkpad T23 with XP was working so slow. I mean, unusably slow, like 30 minutes just to boot. I had used this card successfully at first, but then it didn't seem to work that well, and it was weird that it installs a utility that does exactly what Windows' built-in wireless utility does, and they seemed to be competing. So I uninstalled it. Huge mistake. Basically, the uninstall trashed my machine. I know, because after I rebuilt the machine from scratch (after spending days ruling out viruses, spyware, a bad hard disk, etc.), I reinstalled the wireless card (after setting a restore point), found that it worked poorly, then uninstalled it, and I was back to the 30 minute boot. So now I know that it's the software for this card that is responsible, and it has soaked up about 3 days of my life. Because of this, I plan to not only stay away from this card, but stay away from D-link. They clearly don't know what they're doing on the software side, and that deficiency is likely to pop up its ugly head in other products as well.

What a headache this thing was... I made it all the way through to the point where my system recognized that there was new hardware and I had to click to ignore the fact that D-Link isn't certified by Microsoft (**key point). Then it found the driver file on the CD, and when it tried to install it, it simply said that the hardware could not be installed.

I called the customer support line - a fairly painless process - and walked through the installation with the rep. His conclusions was that a very very small number of CDs get corrupted or are bad (yea right!!) and that I would have to go to the D-Link website to download the most recent installation drivers. He swore that the site had the best and most recent fixes and that it would definitely work.

So the next day I went to the site, after uninstalling everything, and went through the installation process again using the latest and greatest. Result: SAME THING!!! It wouldn't install. What a piece a garbage. I called back in and the guy analyzed the situation and told me to return it, that the hardware was probably faulty. Uh huh...

The thing of it was that he didn't say, oh the card you have is bad, go get another one of the same. He basically implied that I should get a different card. To me this means that I would have the same trouble with all of the DWL-G630 cards I tried - due to incompatibility with XP SP2 - and that I need to get a real product that has been certified by Microsoft. (i.e. Linksys, ahem...)

Save your money!! Stay away!! Don't waste your time!!

Even the guy at Bestbuy said that the Linksys versions were much more reliable. I did actually buy the Linksys at first, but the signal was too weak, so I wanted to try a different one to see if it would be better. What a mistake! I'm going back to the weak signal thank you...

Unlike other reviewers, I have never had a problem using this card and it has worked fine for me. The only thing I did have to do was pair it with a mimo router to get the best functionality out of it - I use an original Belkin pre-n router (one of the earlier pre-n) designs and it works very well throughout my home. With a standard Dlink 802.11G router signal to noise was atrocious.

Points to note:

1. I am in the IT industry and able to troubleshoot things that give less technical folks problems - pardon the lack of modesty. All due respect to the other reviewers but wireless isn't as simple as "plug them in and go" yet.
2. Never had a problem installing the drivers. In case anybody is interested, Windows Vista detects it as a standard Atheros Wireless card and it is up and running as soon as you plug it in.
2. Power consumption and processor utilization are not concerns for me so I haven't studied them. I use the card with a ThinkPad T40 and haven't noticed any performance problems, or problems with power consumption.

Well, first of all, the drivers wouldn't install, so I had to go against the instructions and install the card without first installing the drivers (under the supervision of tech support). Finally manually installed the drivers and it worked fine until I rebooted the computer.

At that time, my Compaq Presario 2190US recognizes it only as PCMCIA MTD-0002 instead of as a network adapter, so I have to deal with the "Found new hardware" process on each restart. Not sure if I'm keeping this or not.

Tech support -
For the most part, they were helpful, although ultimately, they told me to return the "faulty" card. I had one punk hang up on me. He wasn't listening to my problem, and it was obvious from what he was saying that he didn't even UNDERSTAND my problem. I had to interrupt him to try to make him understand what was going on, when he said "I'm not finished and you need to listen to me."

Then, when he thought the problem was resolved, he wanted to just hang up. I kept telling him the problem occured when I rebooted my computer, so I wanted him to remain on the line while I rebooted to see what would happen. While waiting for the reboot, I heard the familiar clickety-click and tone following, indicating he had hung up. When I called back, the new support tech indicated he had marked the inquiry as "resolved."

I got this card because it was the only thing the bookstore on my campus sold at the time that my linksys was stepped on and broken. This is a piece of garbage. I am on WinXP and the connection drops in and out. Constantly. My Linksys card worked flawlessly for over a year and a half. Also, if you have 2.4 Ghz phones in your house, this card is very susceptable to the interferance from it, so try not to keep the phone near the card if possible, but even this will not help much. This card is still not XP certified after being out for months, meaning either the company is to lazy/cheap to get it certified or it failed certification testing due to drives issues and overall poor quality. Tech support is also laughable. If you look at other online reviews, you will see that the card works great on some computers but will crash others, so its a toss up. All of of this amounts to one thing; SAVE YOUR MONEY! Im gonna go get another linksys tommorow.