Buyer Beware - LinkSys WPC54GS wireless card

Greetings folks,
I recently came in here to see if others were having the same problems
with this card. It seems some are...

I recently purchased this card to compliment my notebook merely for
asethetics. I also have a netgear wg511 but opted to use that for a
different notebook that I'm using at home now for work purposes. My
personal notebook is black so I really took a liking to the slightly
shorter and less obtrusive wpc54gs. My router is a WGR-614. After
playing with the linksys card further, I was intrigued by the advanced
driver configurations that can be made (power output, wme, fast power
save mode etc.). Needless to say any combination of driver
configuration yields a card that loves to drop connections frequently,
and simply can't hang with the wg511 on distance, overcoming
interference, and bandwidth. I live in a 900 foot apartment space and
using the wg511 right now, I have a 95% signal rate and 54Mbps
connection link right now. In the very same position, I'm lucky if I
get 45% signal strength with the linksys, actually even going down to
1Mb and dropping connection totally, not even able to reconnect. Since
buying the card, I've lost connections more times than I've blink. In
addition I round the wireless utility manager lousy. It constantly
shows no connection to the internet (even when there is one) making it
inaccurate and therefore partly useless.

I just wanted to know if any here have experienced similiar distaste
for this card? I'll be taking it back to Wal-Mart 1st thing tommorrow.
Since I still need a card, I was thinking of the netgear wg511 v2 but
after reading about the newer chipset from others here, it seems that
might be a disappoint as opposed to the v1 too.

Any recommendations on another really good card (as I've found the
wg511 v1 to be) preferably in a black color?

Regards

yes wrote:
> Greetings folks,
> I recently came in here to see if others were having the same problems
> with this card. It seems some are...
>
> I recently purchased this card to compliment my notebook merely for
> asethetics. I also have a netgear wg511 but opted to use that for a
> different notebook that I'm using at home now for work purposes. My
> personal notebook is black so I really took a liking to the slightly
> shorter and less obtrusive wpc54gs. My router is a WGR-614. After
> playing with the linksys card further, I was intrigued by the advanced
> driver configurations that can be made (power output, wme, fast power
> save mode etc.). Needless to say any combination of driver
> configuration yields a card that loves to drop connections frequently,
> and simply can't hang with the wg511 on distance, overcoming
> interference, and bandwidth. I live in a 900 foot apartment space and
> using the wg511 right now, I have a 95% signal rate and 54Mbps
> connection link right now. In the very same position, I'm lucky if I
> get 45% signal strength with the linksys, actually even going down to
> 1Mb and dropping connection totally, not even able to reconnect. Since
> buying the card, I've lost connections more times than I've blink. In
> addition I round the wireless utility manager lousy. It constantly
> shows no connection to the internet (even when there is one) making it
> inaccurate and therefore partly useless.
>
> I just wanted to know if any here have experienced similiar distaste
> for this card? I'll be taking it back to Wal-Mart 1st thing tommorrow.
> Since I still need a card, I was thinking of the netgear wg511 v2 but
> after reading about the newer chipset from others here, it seems that
> might be a disappoint as opposed to the v1 too.
>
> Any recommendations on another really good card (as I've found the
> wg511 v1 to be) preferably in a black color?
>
> Regards


Nevermind about this (not that anyone cared but I've since took the
oh-so-craptacular linksys card back (to Walmart) and borrowed a Dell
Wlan 1350 mini pci out of a work laptop. Not as great a signal as the
Netgear but oodles better than the linksys... and internal too :>) I
lose the broadcom utility functionality (incompatible with the dell
c610) but other than that, not a dropped signal yet; very
straightforward.