Follow Up--Linksys Wireless PC Card/PCI Card

We picked up both at the Best Buy sale noted in our weekend edition to see if they might be low cost alternatives to the much more expensive but Mac-compatible Lucent Orinoco and Farallon SkyLine equipment. No luck. The $80 wireless PC card did not include Mac drivers and did work with Apple's AirPort 1.2 or 1.3 drivers in a PowerBook 2400c or a PowerBook G3 2000.

Then we tried our Lucent Orinoco Silver Turbo PC card (used for over a year with our PowerBook 2400c) in the $30 Linksys PCI Adapter card in our Power Mac 7300 with AirPort 1.3 drivers. The Linksys PCI Adapter card didn't work either. We got a message that no AirPort card was installed.

Finally, we put the wireless PCI Adapter and PC card in our lone Compaq Presario desktop and tried to connect it to our AirPort Base Station. Configuration of the Linksys wireless PC card was neither simple nor straight forward but with the aid of several posts located through MacWindows we were able to get it to work partially. Our connection was intermittent and poor despite being less than 20 feet from the AirPort Base Station. We also found that some of the settings were lost after a restart of our Compaq requiring that they be re-entered each time. We had hoped that at the very least to be able free up our Compaq from being hard wired but the performance of the Linksys cards was completely unacceptable. We returned both pieces of equipment.

We would like to point out, however, that our inexpensive Linksys EtherFast router and 10/100 switches continue to perform acceptably.