Customer Reviews
Works like a charm 
2005-07-26
Other than some typos in the install instructions the installation went quite well. It is odd that Netgear have you type in the path to the setup file instead of automatically launching it for you. This may confuse someone with no computer expertise but the average user should have no problems. Had to deduct a star for this drawback.
The card auto negotiated to 1.0Gbps first time and has worked flawlessly with the drivers that came with the product. I did not have any of the problems to other reviewer here did.
I did not experience quite the speed boost I was looking for, but this may be due to a limitation of the laptop rather than the adapter. Older laptops may not benefit from the extra network speed.
Not ideal, but works (eventually) 
2005-06-15
After meticulously following the installation instructions for Windows XP, I encountered nothing but trouble. First, the card switched to different speeds (10, 100, and 1000) so frequently that it was unusable. I tried different Cat 5e cables, different ports on my GigE switch (that another computer has no problems with), and even a 10/100 switch. Interestingly, the LEDs on the device indicated that it was able to detect & lock onto 1000 Mbps, right away. Disabling auto-negotiation didn't help, at all.
I checked Netgear's site for an updated driver. The only one they had was labelled something like "Initial Version". As the name suggests, all the file sizes & dates were the same as the one on the included CD. Then, I tried upgrading the driver for my CardBus controller. This resulted in the computer becoming unresponsive, whenever a network cable was plugged into the card!
Finally, in a fit of desperation, I checked Realtek's site for new drivers (the Realtek RTL8169/8110 seems to be the controller used in this card). Interestingly, the driver showed up in the "hot downloads" section - so it seems others may have been experiencing problems with this chipset, too. After I installed it, all my problems magically disappeared!
SHAME ON NETGEAR!! I'll concede that the bar for product quality, across the industry, has been gradually lowered to a point where I'm not even surprised to find buggy drivers included with the hardware. However, I think it's virtually unforgivable that they failed to provide updated drivers on their website, when the included drivers were so poor and given that this product has been on the market for nearly a year!!
This is my second experience with Realtek-based networking products that are virtually unusable - at least with the shipping driver. I will definitely avoid Realtek-based products, in the future.
Even if I hadn't encountered the various driver problems, I'd still have difficulty giving this product a 5-star rating. My other complaints include: rather disappointing performance, excessive heat dissipation / power consumption, high CPU utilization, and only 3KB MTU jumbo frame support. I can't even hit 200 Mbps on a 1.4 GHz Pentium M, when the file is entirely in cache, and I'm transferring it to a very fast server. Upon ejecting, after use, the card is almost too hot to touch - I hope this amount of heat doesn't cause damage to my notebook & I would be concerned about using this card on battery power (though usually if you can plug into ethernet, you can also use AC power). When transferring large files (such as in my previous example), it seems my CPU usage nearly tops out - to be fair, I don't know if this is more the fault of the card, the drivers, or my notebook. Finally, if you're planning to use this on an exclusively GigE LAN, where all the other machines can be configured to use Jumbo frames, you'll probably be disappointed to find that this card only supports up to 3 KB MTU (even though the driver suggests otherwise, by providing an option including sizes up to 7 KB) - it should be noted that this probably won't affect at least 95% of users.
On the other hand, the price is pretty good.
Works as expected 
2007-05-09
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.
Not fully tested - should however work 2006-05-27
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.
Works until you try to boot without it. SUCKS 
2006-01-26
I am shocked that Netgear is providing an old driver (2004) NOT CERTIFIED WITH XP. Bought this Jan 2006. The crashing drove me crazy since nothing identified the driver as the problem until a day later through process of elimination.
Wow. Netgear really blew it on this one.
Warning - NDIS 2.0 drivers are NOT supplied despite what box says 2005-12-05
You would think that a gigabit PCMCIA card would be just what most Norton GHOST or Altiris users were waiting for...network imaging would now hopefully be complete in a fraction of the usual 100 Mbit time. So I was excited to see on the GA511 box that NDIS 2.0 drivers were included!!! Imagine my surprise when I got home, opened the box, checked the product CD, and FOUND NO NDIS drivers !!! Several inquiries to Netgear Tech Support have confirmed NO NDIS drivers are included and none planned!!! Are they insane? Laptops and drive imaging using products like GHOST were made for each other, and now Netgear won't support NDIS 2.0 for GHOST and similar boot-disk imagers? It's simply false advertising, with no apologies! Avoid this card and wait for Linksys or Belkin to offer the same WITH an NDIS driver.
Very Good Product 2005-08-20
I loved it, It worked very well, I didn't have any problems with the driver, It's very suitable for home & business use
