Customer Reviews

Netgear MA401 802.11b Wireless PC Card

5 star:		(87)
4 star:		(35)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(22)

 

 

I received this wireless card as a gift with the Linksys wireless access point. This card was VERY easy to install in my IBM T21 laptop running Windows 2000. The Linksys wireless access point works great, but there have been a number of reviews on the difficulty configuring the Linksys card--we ran into similar problems after purchasing a Linksys Card for a second laptop in the house). After doing my own product comparison, I would highly recommend the NetGear wireless card over the Linksys card. For range of signal and ease of setup, the NetGear card is far superior. With the NetGear Card connectivity rarely drops, and I had no need to download additional drivers to install the card. When placed equidistant from the Linksys wireless access point, we'd see an Excellent Link Quality on the Netgear card Configuration utility, but on the similar utility on the Linksys card, we would see either poor or NO signal. This Netgear card is a fine product, I'm definitely enjoying the freedom of no wires while surfing the web.

The Netgear MA401 802.11b Wireless PC Card is great for Windows 95, NT, Linux and Macintosh operating systems. The reason is that there are no other wireless cards that I know of that have DRIVERS for the wireless card to operate with the other operating systems. Newer Netgear products will not work.

The MA401 has a 16 bit PCMCIA interface is great for some older laptops that will not support a newer 32 bit cardbus interface.

This is in addition to the fact the MA401 is built well and has very good signal strenght.

Wow. That was all I could say when I got this card and the MR314 router home and connected. I have to admit that I haven't used any other wireless networking products, so I cannot compare NetGear's products with any others. But I did do a good deal of research when deciding which company to use. At first I was only considering the Linksys and D-Link products, and had a tough time deciding which to try. Last week, Best Buy was offering a rebate on the NetGear products, so I thought that I would research them, too. I am SO glad that I did! I found very few (if any) disparaging remarks in regards to these products, and now, after using them myself, I know why.

Once I had the products home, I plugged the card into my wife's notebook (running Windows 98), inserted the installation disk into her CD-ROM, and 3 minutes later it was completed. Then, I plugged the router (MR314) into the outlet in my office and ran the ethernet line from the router to a NIC card in my PC in there. The LED lights for power and the local PC instantly lit up, but the wireless one did not. So, I walked back into the room with the laptop to check the status light on the card to see if it was lit. By the time I got back to the laptop, the light on the wireless card was lit up. So I walked back into the office, and the wireless light was not lit. It synched up that fast. I was amazed.

I then used the Windows XP built-in functionality on my PC to setup the network. This was also very simple, thanks to XP. I finished this, shared the folders/files/whatever I wanted to on my PC, did the same on my wife's laptop, and I was finished.

The entire process took approximately 15 minutes. And there was no issue whatsoever using Windows XP. I had read some reviews for both the Linksys and D-Link products, and some people had issues with XP, which was another reason I tried the NetGear products.

A few days later my cable company (Insight) came out to install my internet service, and I plugged my Motorola SB4100 modem into the router, and again had no issues (besides my own inexperience). I had everything running through the router in about 20 minutes. Again, very simple.

I would definitely suggest this product if you are considering a wireless network. This card will also work with any 802.11b network, so you don't HAVE to purchase the NetGear router with this card; but I would suggest you did.

Normally, I like to buy all components from the same manufacturer, but the reviews on the Netgear wireless network card convinced me to buy it even though I was also purchasing a Linksys 4 port wireless cable/dsl router. The set up for the Netgear MA401 was straight-forward and quick. The router is on the second floor of my condo and I'm writing this review on the first floor. The Netgear utility program shows the signal and link strength as being Excellent at 100%.

I enabled WEP security on the router and it only took a few seconds to configure it for the Netgear card.

Lastly, the PCMCIA card has a small profile due to its built-in antenna compared to other alternatives.

I highly recommend this product due to its easy set up and compatibility with the Linksys router.

The card installs quickly and runs well. I only have one complaint. The version 1.3 CD that is included with the product has drivers for Win 95/Win98/ME/2000/NT/Linux.

I installed this card in a Win95 PC using the MA301 PCI adapter. This combination works well for the older PC which is about 50 feet away from the ME102 802.11b Access Point. I get 11mbps with 60% link quality and 60% signal strength.

However, the card does not come with drivers for XP, a new operating system introduced by Microsoft this September. I recently bought a new VAIO PCG-FXA32 laptop which runs XP, so the product did not completely work out of the box for me.

I installed it using the Win2000 drivers and it runs for the most part except the display for the current channel on the link info tab and the PS mode on the configuration panel did not display properly. I am using the ME102 802.11b Access Point and am able to cover my entire 3 story wood frame house with it. I get good coverage in the basement, in my back yard, and in the dining room with 11mbps service and 75%-100% link quality and 75%-100% signal strength being typical.

I called Neesus (the manufacturer of the drivers) and reported the problem to them. They sent me the following driver updates to solve the problem: config.exe version 4.6.4.20 and ndcprtns.sys 1.5.0.5 I've reported the solution of this minor problem to Netgear. They should post these new drivers for XP.

For fixed PCs which use Win98/WinME/Win2000/WinNT/Linux and have a USB port, I would use the MA101 USB adapter instead because the unit and antennas can be repositioned to optimize reception.

I think the Netgear product is easy to install for a wireless home network. It took me less than 10 minutes to install for the Win95 PC and a bit longer with the XP laptop due to the problem I described.

I would improve the product with site survey software wich would allow you to pick the best channel to use considering that these systems are getting popular and occupy the same channels as cordless phones and microwave ovens.

(...)

I'm running Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 on a IBM Thinkpad T21 laptop. I bought the Netgear access point (ME102) and connected that to my Linksys 4 Port DSL/Cable Modem firewall router. I installed and configured the access point and MA401 card on my IBM laptop. At first the wireless card worked. Although I started getting a few blue screens of death, it worked okay. Despite my system become slightly more unstable I was happy.

Then all of a sudden it stopped working. The LED on the PC Card would only go on for a second and then turn off. After a few calls to Netgear's support desk and doing some troubleshooting with them, they realized my MA401 PC Card was dead. Netgear sent me a new one after I sent them my bad card (pretty decent support) at no cost.

It now works but my system is slightly unstable when I use it (blue screen of death once a week or so).

To make my system more stable I have been attempting to install new MA401 drivers from Netgear. I downloaded a file called MA401v200.zip, which I believe are new drivers but I cannot figure out for the life of me how to install the new drivers. There are no instructions. I am a seasoned IT person but I still can't figure out how to install the new MA401 drivers.

Given all of this I can't recommend the MA401 wireless access card. The ME102 access point is fine. I get good coverage in the house. I even get a signal from the basement, two floors below the access on the 2nd floor of the house (wooden house with sheet rock).

FYI - I bought all of the networking gear on Amazon.

After returning the more expensive Dlink router and card I bought because of poor range (I have an old house with wetplaster walls on steel mesh) I bought this card with the 814 router. I was up and running in 15 minutes and I am an accountant not an IT person. The card worked flawlessly with windows XP. I puchased it a few weeks ago so it is posible they update the drivers for XP. If you are on the fence about buying this because you have XP don't let that stop you it works fine. As far as range it is much better than the dlink card I had.

I purchased the MA-401 along with the Netgear FM114P router (see separate review)from Amazon. I am using a DELL 5000 Inspiron laptop running Windows 2000. The package had a newer version of the software (according to the literature) and the installation instructions were actual screens shots of the install process with appropriate responses to be selected at each step. The installation took about 5 minutes. I shutdown the laptop, plugged in the MA-401 and booted then inserted the installation CD. The installation was true plug and play.

After installation the card worked flawlessly. In a 2500 sq ft home (plus basement) the card worked well in every room including the basement. The FM114P router was located on the first floor. The MA-401 also worked outside but the signal weakened about 40-50 feet from the house and orientation of the laptop then determined signal strength.

A co-worker bought the same setup to use with a Compaq laptop running NT. Installation was more tricky with NT(need to read the manual) and we had more trouble getting the system working reliably but it now seems OK.

Setting up the printer port and changing router/card setting for encryption, SSID, etc. was less straight forward than initial card installation but not a huge task. The MA-401 and the FM114P work together right out of the box without configuration but will be less secure if not configured.

I highly recommend both the MA-401 and the FM114P.

I have no problem installing the Netgear wireless card driver on my Win2000. I didn't have to install the utility because I was using the same utility as the SMC wireless card that I install earlier. However, you will see the SMC trademark on the utility even thought you are using the Netgear wireless card. .... I have no problem of communicating between my Netgear wireless card and my SMC Networks SMC7004AWBR Wireless 4-Port Broadband Router with Print Server.

I spent a lot of time reading the reviews about wireless access points, wireless routers and wireless network cards. I finally decided on the Linksys router and the Netgear MA 301/401 interface card. So, here's the deal. I have a PII-400 running Win98 that is connected to the router using Cat 5 cable, which is then connected to a cable modem. For those of you who don't know, Cat 5 cable is simply the standard ethernet cable. I then installed the MA 301/401 combo on another computer, a Packard Bell PII-233 running Win95. Unfortunately Win95 had an IRQ conflict with the PCI card (MA 301) that could not be resolved. I installed Win98 and the IRQ conflict disappeared.

After getting the Packard Bell system set up, the MA 301/401 would not link up with the Linksys router. I called Netgear tech support and discovered that the SSID on the card must be identical to the SSID on the router. I discovered that the Linksys SSID was "linksys" and the SSID on the card was "Linksys." When I changed the "L" to an "l", the card connected to the router immediately and I was in business.

The Packard Bell machine is on the 2nd floor of my townhouse and the Linksys router is in the basement. The signal, therefore, is passing thru 2 floors and 2 walls. The link quality and signal strength are consistently in the "good" category and sometimes they are "excellent." These are qualitative measures reported by the Netgear card's software.

As for performance, I downloaded a 19MB file off Microsoft's web site and it took less than 5 minutes via the wireless connection.

I have to admit that I was a bit apprehensive about buying the Linksys router. The reviews are mixed and some people have totally trashed it. I decided to give it a try, figuring that I would return it if it didn't work well. The same thing for the MA301/401 card; some loved it and some hated it. I was also concerned that having a router and card from different manufacturers would cause problems. It turns out that I didn't need to be concerned at all because both pieces are working perfectly.

Contrary to what others have said, my connection has not been lost and it takes only a few seconds to establish the wireless connection on startup. I have found that the documentation provided with both items was adequate. However, I wish each of them would have mentioned the importance of having the same SSID on the router and the card. I have not talked with Linksys tech support, but the two calls to Netgear went well.

Things to watch out for: 1)The Netgear MA 301, which is the PCI card that plugs into the desktop computer must be used with the Netgear MA 401 wireless PC card. This PC card will also fit in a laptop. 2) As I mentioned, the SSID must be the same on both pieces of hardware. 3)I have not activated the WEP encryption so I have no idea how it will affect performance.

The bottom line: I highly recommend the Linksys BEFW11S4 V.2 router and the Netgear MA 301/401 interface card.