|
NETGEAR GA311 Gigabit Ethernet PCI AdapterI purchased three Netgear GA311s and installed them in XP computers. Only one of the three works at above 100mps. Netgear has such confusing support, I decided it wasn't worth the frustration to try to solve the problem.I will not buy Netgear products in the future because of the support difficulties.
I'm unhappy with my purchase. I called back and the next fellow said that they made no products for Mac and that no drivers were available and questioned my truthfullness that one of their employees would have told me this.
I heard from more than one source, including Netgear, that it would - but that's not the case. This product does not work on my G4 Mac.
But the drivers at this address are all PC. It is correctly installed.
I spent a half hour on the phone with Netgear - one guy assured me that it would work on a Mac and gave me their web address where I could download a driver that would solve my connectivity problem. In addition to this insult they were very unhelpful - trying to get me to go to third party websites for drivers and then later admitting that none existed.
I was not allowed to return or exchange the product.
Sometimes Windows 2000 drivers work on Windows 2003 Server, but I opted not to make a testing activity out of my purchase. I purchased two of these NICs; one for a Windows 2003 Server and the other for a Vista workstation. Although there's support for Vista, there is no driver support for Windows 2003 Server. I've since checked the Microsoft HCL; returned the Netgear GA311 and purchased a NIC that's on the list from Amazon. RMA process with Amazon was very easy.
This was a snap to install and get going. It is lightning fast and was well worth the small investment.
I picked this up after having some trouble with a few other network cards, while trying to get both kgdb support in Linux, and gigabit ethernet networking at the same time.This card works perfectly with Linux, at least for the Redhat-based distros I've been dealing with lately. If you're compiling your network drivers into the kernel (not as kernel modules), for kernel 2.6.18 and later, just choose "Realtek 8169 gigabit ethernet support" in the kernel configuration and it will work.
|
