Review on 🔌 Maximize Connectivity with Netgear MA521 802.11b Wireless PC Card by Richard Deng

I bought this card for an old Toshiba (Win98) laptop I bought on eBay for DSL access at home and in to have at school. I bought this card because 1) it was cheap and 2) it didn't protrude too much from the laptop, which is something I hate about most wireless PCMCIA cards. I wiped the hard drive, installed XP Home SP2 on the laptop and put this card in. It requested drivers from a CD and in less than five minutes I was connected and my home wireless network was up and running. So far so good, but I soon discovered that this card has a few strange properties: 1) I ordered this card from the Zshops seller on Revain.com and got a Comcast MA521, which is basically the same as Netgear, Netgear- Drivers and Utilities etc. uses the same card just renamed. 2) When I'm connected to my Linksys WAP11 at home, the signal is never complete, and even when I'm sitting right next to the router, the signal oscillates between 2 and 4 bands for no apparent reason. However, when I connect to a Linksys WRT54G at school, the signal meter works fine. Definitely weird. 3) When I'm not in the same room as the router, this card disconnects and reconnects every few minutes. It's not a big problem as it usually reconnects after a second or two, but it means "connected to". the message continues to appear. To get rid of these messages, I let the Netgear utility manage my wireless connections, but it still drops the connection for a second or two. A little annoying. 4) When I wake the laptop from sleep, the card doesn't connect properly the first time. I have to unplug it and plug it back in to get the right connection. These "quirks" are unique to my Linksys WAP11, so this card just doesn't seem to get along well with my WAP11, which is quite annoying. It works great with the newer WRT54G. All in all you get what you pay for. Don't expect a great signal range and the connection will drop if the signal strength drops, which is annoying. Although it serves its purpose.