[Techtalk] Netgear problems (was: Netgear MA401 and Red Hat 8.0 on an HP laptop)

[sara]

Julianne wrote: 
> The first problem I had was that I couldn't get two Netgear NICs
> to work in my firewall when it was running Linux, but they would
> work when I was running Win2K.  So I replaced one with an Intel
> NIC and things worked great. So I decided that all new NICs would
> be Intel.  Over the past two years I've had to replace all but
> one of the Netgear NICs (and that includes =two= PCMCIA wired
> NICs).  In the same amount of time I've only had one non-Netgear
> NIC fail -- an SMC PCMCIA wireless NIC.

I've never had a Netgear nic fail on me, but certain motherboards don't
like them. I've got an Asus A7M266-D in the office which runs slowly and
crashes periodically with certain Netgear cards in its 32-bit slots, and
won't even start up with them in its 64-bit slots. (Something about
NetGear calling PCI 2.1 cards "2.2" because they added an extra notch so
they could *fit* into 2.2 slots, but they're not actually 2.2 compliant.
I never was able to get a straight answer on this one.) 

So the office is currently divided between Netgear nics in the Soyo
boards, and Intel nics in the Asus boards. The Soyo/Netgear computers
are getting lower transfer rates over the network and experiencing more
blips. They're slowly getting migrated over to Intel nics, and
experience better performance. (Netgear nics tend to work better on
Macs, though. Curious.) 

The point of this? Even though Netgear cards *can* be sturdy and
reliable and fulfill every purpose, Intel nics tend to be worth the
extra bit of money you spend. You can get an inexpensive 10/100/1000
Intel Nic for about $15 more than a cheap 10/100 NetGear nic these days
anyway. (PCI, not PCMCIA. Not sure about PCMCIA pricing. I use a D-Link
pcmcia card in my laptop--but I'm running OpenBSD on that machine.) 

-Sara