Netgear's own software is lousy on Windows- aside from the installer corrupting my registry once and putting a bunch of icons on my desktop, it doesn't add anything beyond Microsoft's. Their drivers don't even exist for Linux, but since they use a generic chipset, most distributions can support it. Their telephone support doesn't exist, and it is nearly impossible to find any helpful information on the MA311 on their website.

Those negatives aside, the card works quite well, which is the most important issue for me. If you're technically competent and don't need any handholding, this isn't a bad card.

If you have this MA311 card in a Windows 2000 computer then upgrade to XP, IT WILL NOT WORK!

I have tried this process on two separate PCs; the card is then unusable in that machine afterwards, no amount of changing PCI slots, un/reinstalling drivers helps, you just various annoying windows errors such as 'driver installation was unsuccessful'.

Tech support are quite useless and sound very much like they're reading from a script, mainly because that's exactly what they're doing.