COMPUSA has a good deal on a netgear wireless router: after countless mail-in rebates you can get a 54Mb wireless router (g) with a 54Mb wireless PCI card all for $40. From what I could gather, the pci card uses the madwifi driver. Would I have to manually download and compile the madwifi driver or does it come with FC2 or FC3? Are there rpms? I would like to know this before I actually go ahead and buy the card.
Abut the Netgear and similary priced D-Link router. I bought D-Link for $30 Canadian ($70 base price and $40 mail-in rebate) over the web for Christmass (however it arrived couple of days ago). Returned it after two days. Connection between the router and all wireless cards I tested with it (4 cards in total) was constantly going up and down (sometimes once every few minutes, sometimes couple of times per minute). The signal strenght was at maximum (or almost at maximum), but thing was just loosing connectivity. Basically, it worked, but it worked slow because of unstable connection. I found on the web that others had same problem with that router. No solutions.
When considering what to get as replacement, Netgear (the one with rebates, same price, same rebate as D-Link) was one of the options. But I found other people had problems with that one too. So I decided to skip it, and not waste the time on it.
At the end, I bought Linksys Wireless-G, base price was almost the same as D-Link and Netgear (Dell has a sale, $71 Canadian), but "only" $15 mail-in rebate that expires today or tommorow (D-Link and Netgear had $40 mail-in rebate), and got additional 5% off at FutureShop (I found that Dell was selling it for lower price then FutureShop (I think the ownership is same as BestBuy, basically same shop), so they price-matched and gave me additional 5% bellow Dell price, weeeheee). More money at the end, but Linksys worked perfectly with everything I threw at it.
-- Aleksandar Milivojevic <amilivojevic@xxxxxx> Pollard Banknote Limited Systems Administrator 1499 Buffalo Place Tel: (204) 474-2323 ext 276 Winnipeg, MB R3T 1L7
