( 6 reviews )
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Posted: Dec 30 2008
Works as advertised. Like-new but at substantially reduced price compared with brand new item. Nicely packaged, but didn't include documentation. However, latest documentation and drivers for the GA511 available for download from the NetGear website. Requires ethernet cable and cable connectors to be in nearly perfect condition to opperate in gigabit mode. Otherwise, the card falls back to 10/100 megabit speed operation. Highly recommended for gigabit networks, to speed file transfer and streaming on notebook PCs with P4 3.0 GHz processor or higher.
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Posted: May 10 2007
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.
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Posted: May 27 2006
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.
