Customer Reviews

NETGEAR GA511 Gigabit Ethernet PC Card

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

Other than some typos in the install instructions the installation went quite well. It is odd that Netgear have you type in the path to the setup file instead of automatically launching it for you. This may confuse someone with no computer expertise but the average user should have no problems. Had to deduct a star for this drawback.

The card auto negotiated to 1.0Gbps first time and has worked flawlessly with the drivers that came with the product. I did not have any of the problems to other reviewer here did.

I did not experience quite the speed boost I was looking for, but this may be due to a limitation of the laptop rather than the adapter. Older laptops may not benefit from the extra network speed.

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.

It worked as advertised, and it raised my built-in antique laptop network wired speed from 100 to 1000! My laptop is an Intel P4 with Windows 7 Professional. When it works, it WORKS!

First, make sure you get the newest drivers from the RealTek website (NOT the Netgear website--they won't work on XP). It is the RTL8169 driver and it is located under PCI devices on the website

After installing the RealTek drivers and removing the Netgear drivers, the card started working fine and much better than the internal card on my old laptop. I haven't had the chance to run cable to my GbE switch, but I'll be happy as long as its faster than FE (although I don't expect much more than the 300 or so mbps limited by the Cardbus port). Definitely worth the 6 dollars for a refurbished one

I have always been happy with Netgear products. With this one, however, I believe they have the drivers mixed up by name from what I have read. My problem with this one is my Compaq Presario 12XL401 would not recognize it. As I said, subsequent reading has shown others have experienced the same problem and it seems to be with the drivers. I was unable to get it to work. Amazon.com was very quick to issue a RMA Number and upon receipt, quickly processed a refund. I have nothing negative to say about the product nor the merchant. I never fear to do business with Netgear or Amazon.com.

Product arrived on time and works as I expected. Works w/ both Mac and PC. Very pleased.

Thank you for fast delivery and quality.
I will buy another item in your store.
I will recommand this store.
Thank you so much.

For anyone with a laptop without a built-in LAN adapter, this is a good solution. After downloading and installing new drivers from the Netgear website, this unit worked flawlessly and as expected right out of the box.

This card works very well. I purchased the card for two reasons: 1) faster internet access than the wireless adapter I have and 2) to enable faster movement of files from the laptop to my home server using Gig-E. My laptop is running WinXP and the card installed without any problems. One of the easiest installs I have ever done.