I have NetGear 802.11G network at home with three laptops. I bought 2 x netGear WG511 PCMCIA cards along with the AP/Router. Although these work really well when correctly configured, I would not recommend for a novice user.

By way of example, let me explain what happened when my new IBM T41 arrived. It was the first T41 for my company and the engineers had loaded their standard T40 SOE image onto the machine. All seemed to work, except the T41 has a differnet ethernet interface (10/100/1000Mbps) and so I could not connect to the LAN in the office. No problem, just download the new driver from IBM. But how to do that when you cannot connect to the network. And the T41 does not come with a floppy drive and I didn;t ave a CR Writer on my old system to download and transfer onto CD.

So I thought I would just take it home and plug in my Wireless PCMCIA card and download from the 'net. My Netgear WG511 cards were not recognised by Windows XP - had to download the drivers since the CD that came with the cards only had the original pre-802.11g standard drivers and I had upgraded the AP to the full 802.11g standard and they old drivers would not connect to the upgraded AP - needed the new drivers that can be downloaded off the net.

Oh well, no dead end yet. I pulled out an old 802.11b Cisco Aironet 340 card I bought real cheap second hand off eBay. Plugged it and off it went. No new drivers or anything required.

Also note that the Netgear AP/Router and WG511 PCMCIA cards can all be upgraded via firmware. But if the AP and NIC/drivers are at different versions, they may not work.

So, look for a very common card that is directly supported by the OS. I now have the IBM 802.11a/b/g mini-PCI card under the keyboard and it is great. But I keep the Cisco Aironet 340 card just for times where I need to slot it into a machine without downloading and upgrading drivers.