Home > Consumer Reviews > NETGEAR WG311 Wireless-G PCI Adapter

First of all, this card is a great product and better than any of the competitors, to include Linksys and D-Link. With the deployment of SP2 you will need to change the install procedure for the V2 card so that it works without causing your system to reboot constantly. DO NOT install the utility and drivers ahead of time as the instructions in the packaging tell you to. Rather, install the card, then boot up and let windows detect the hardware. Instead of installing the drivers automatically, use the "I Will Select" the hardware option then through the hardware wizard browse to the XP Drivers folder on the disc and let windows install ONLY the driver, not the utility. XP has a very good wireless management utility and you will give up nothing by not having the Netgear utility installed. The card will finish install and you'll be up and running.

Update: mid November 2004:

Editing the review does not allow reviewer to change the rating. To Netgear's credit, they have issued updates for this card, which now plays just fine with Windows XP SP2. I was able to confirm this during a build of a new machine this weekend.

My rant in September was valid then based on the state of their suppport for XP SP2. They have taken care of this, and if I could, I would elevate this product to 4.5 or 5 stars....

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Original early September review:
Once installed and working: 4 stars. The single star is for the overall experience in Windows XP Home Service Pack 2 environment. This eventually required a rollback from SP2 *and* an operating system reinstall. This might not be worth it for most people seeking just a little faster data througput...

If your are considering purchasing this --or **any other wireless network adapter**-- check carefully for compatability with Windows XP Home SP2. After over 4 hours of my own troubleshooting, and another hour on hold to speak with Netgear tech support, I learned that the only issue was that this device was having major compatability issues with SP2 (which we deployed last month on 4 computers in our network with no negative effects..until now). At this point you pretty much have the choice of returning to your previous (or non-existent) networking environment or uninstalling SP2. WARNING: Do not choose the SP2 uninstall. I went from a midly annoying networking hardware issue to a full blown operating system meltdown. In the case of Netgear, the SP2 compatability issue was not discussed on their web site (and certainly not in the included literature): I had to get this important information from the support rep. only after registering the product for the 90 day support period. If you are putting any wireless adapter into an XP SP2 system, it is time well spent to check with their tech support BEFORE install. The hold time may be time consuming, but it will be less so than Windows reinstallation (or a hard drive reformat!). Naturally, since my Netgear issue has morphed into a Windows issue, there's no more help coming from Netgear on this. I've had generally good experiences with Netgear products (a new router and laptop PCMCIA card installed flawlessly and were up and running in minutes), but this combined MS-Netgear SNAFU is a disaster of major proportions. Your experience may vary...but it would take very little for it to be better than mine! Good luck, and caveat emptor!
Update: Rollback from XP SP2 plus a reinstall of the operating system plus another 45 minutes on the phone with tech suppprt and we did succeed in getting it running. Enjoying the higher throughput, but I'm not sure it was worth the effort.

I'd like to start off by saying this is the only Netgear product I ever had a problem with.

I actually have the older WG311v2 edition of this product and it seemed to work for a while. The problem occured when I started getting constant dropping after a few minutes of being connected. I investigated and found that of every 10-15 pings I sent to the router (both a Netgear MR814 802.11b and the WGR614 I decided to upgrade to), it would lag once for up to 1 whole second which is bad when it comes to network connectivity between a system and the router. I tried disconnecting 2.4GHz phones, switching channels, moving the router, moving the computer, replacing the router, changing the PCI slot the card sat in, using Wireless Zero Config, using the latest Netgear util. Nothing worked. To top it off ping testing with other computers wireless on the network showed no dropping. The WG311v2 would drop/lag and I would have to manually make it work again with enable/disabling of the card and reboots of the machine.

I did some research into the card and read that a possible hotfix might have caused an issue. Nope, the Hotfix wasn't installed on my system. I later learned that the WG311v2 card just plain has major problems when it comes to reliable connectivity.

I picked up a D-Link DWL-G510L the next day for cheap and plugged it in and installed the latest drivers. No problems at all AND the drivers supported WPA-PSK, WPA, WPA2-PSK, and WPA2. The WG311v2 only supports WPA and WPA-PSK.

Netgear might have fixed the issues with the WG311v2 with the release of the current WG311v3 but they also might not have. I would take a closer look at the D-Link. It works, is usually cheaper, and it supports the latest wireless security protocols and works great with Wireless Zero Config.

This card turns out to be compatible with Win XP SP2 only if you limit yourself to installing the drivers. The Netgear utility that comes with it as part of the installer is not compatible with SP2, and causes a blue screen crash. I found this out the hard way! So when Windows prompts you for drivers, browse to the Drivers/XP directory on the CD, and let Windows do the rest. Don't use the installer!

As detailed in many other reviews before this, the included software has a problem with XP2. In my case, the software installed fine, but would drop signal frequently, and it was all very frustrating. BTW, the CD had the latest version of the software. Here's the right way to install:
1. Uninstall bundled software.
2. Reboot
3. At the 'Found new hardware, install driver' dialog, choose 'Have Disk' or equivalent, and point it to the 'drivers\XP' folder on the CD.
4. Done.

This has the net result of ditching Netgear's wireless manager in favor of the in built windows one, which is perfectly adequate. I'm getting 4 bars out of 5 with the router in the basement and the desktop in the 2nd floor.

Good product, faulty software.