Customer Reviews

Proxim ORiNOCO Silver - Network adapter - PC Card - 802.11b

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

 

 

I purchased two Orinoco Silver PC cards, one for my old G3 Powerbook (Wallstreet) and one for my daughter's Dell Latitude laptop. They both work great and get very good signals and data transfer speeds from anywhere in the house.

Installing on the Dell Latitude (w/Win ME) was easy. Install the drivers from the included CD and plug in the card and I was on my wireless home network using 64 bit WEP for security.

Installing on the Macintosh Powerbook was more problematic. The CD that comes with this card has a folder containing Mac drivers but they didn't work for me. However, I some net searching told me that this is the same card sold as Apple's Airport card and that I could use Apple's Airport drivers. So I downloaded and installed Airport 2.0.2 (which works with MacOS 9.0.4 and up). Because my Powerbook is old (1998), I can't upgrade past MacOS 9.1 and can't use the latest Airport drivers (2.0.4) but the 2.0.2 work fine and support 64 bit WEP which I use on my home network.

My home network is based on the Netgear FM411P router/firewall/access point/print server which works great with these cards.

I have tried out several wireless lan cards, linksys, d-link, etc. and none have come close to the performance of the orinoco card. My Linksys card...dropped to 2 mps when i moved into the next room. In contrast, my orinoco silver card stayed at 11mps even when i was two stories down (access point on 2nd floor of house and i was in basement)...It definately the BEST performing card on the market.

Often times, as you may know, a particular product's quality among various manufacturers is very similar, with any difference being more media hype than actual performance. However, in certain cases (like with memory sticks for example) the difference is drastic. Here is yet another case.
It's well known among the "techie" community that Orinoco's (either silver or gold) are the best wireless cards, and by a wide margin. Their performance is a drastic improvement over any other card, and as evidenced in one of the ratings, this card allows you to use your computer/laptop in places you wouldn't think possible. Hope this helps.

I bought Orinoco silver for my Sony Vaio (win98)to work with the LinkSys's wireless router. I got this one instead of Linksys's own pc card because reviews say it has much better range. It took some effort for me to get this pc card installed. On the first attempt, I lost video, and I took the card out of the slot and got the video back but lost mouse and keyboard control. I called tech support (the most knowledge tech support I've ever talked to!), they immediately recognized the problem and told me to upgrade my BIOS or upgrade to win2000 -- even though Orinoco says that it's win98 compatible. The BIOS upgrade from Sony website didn't work, so I upgraded to win2000 (not a very easy task on a Sony Vaio). After the upgrade, I got the card working with my LinkSys with little effort. Signal strength adaquate to go one floor down without sacrifice in speed.

I have a Linksys wireless 4-port cable/DSL router which works well with a Cisco Aironet PC card. Unfortunately, the Orinoco card I bought would never talk properly with the Linksys. Neither the Orinoco (Agere/Proxima) tech support people nor the Linksys tech support people could get them to work together. This card may work well with other access points, but not with this Linksys unit.

There's lots that's good about this little card, but the best thing of all is that it works with my 5-year old Newton MessagePad 2100 with a driver that's downloadable from the Internet.

The hardware works quite well with Linux, The Mac, and Win2K, but the product has been bounced around so much since Lucent's original release, finding current drivers and documentation is a major undertaking. Tech-support from its current owner doesn't respond to inquiries, and the software for configuration suffers in comparison to other vendors, such as Apple.

If you're into mucking around the web or newsgroups, you can get help- once you get it to work, it does perform quite well.