I'm still in the dark ages. I don't have a wireless network notebook adapter, but I would like to get one. Would appreciate any suggestions re what would be the cheapest but still decent product to go with. (Don't want to spend too much money because I will probably be getting a new laptop that will have it already built in within the next 6 months or so.)

I can't give you a comparison, but I've got a LinkSys 2.4 GHz 802.11b card (Model WPC11) that I plug into my laptop and it works fine and have yet to find anyplace that has public Wi-Fi that I can't get on easily with.

I got it free from Starwood Hotels as part of a Four Points By Sheraton promotion. But I've seen them in stores for $39. My guess is that you can even find them for $29 or lower at some places or websites.

FYI, I'm running Windows XP Home with SP2 loaded.

I don't have any brand suggestion--they should all work OK, check pricegrabber.com, but they all seem to get positive reviews--but I do recommend 802.11g rather than 802.11b.

Microsoft's is available for $21.

g has higher bandwidth than b, but if you're accessing the internet, your connection will be the bottleneck 99+% of the time. You only need g if you're downloading very big files from a local 100MB+ server/network, IMHO

Edit:

If you move fast:
b - $6.95 - http://www.ecost.com/ecost/shop/detail.asp?DPNo=300133
g - $9.99 - http://www.ecost.com/ecost/shop/detail.asp?DPNo=344253

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.

Hmm. You mention the cheapest. I'll mention the best. Trust me it can make a difference when trying to get on that sometimes low powered or distant wireless network. I reccomend Cisco's A/B/G (AIR-CB21AG). Best card on the market IMHO. Cards by Orinco also do well. Bear in mind the Cisco will set you back about 110.

I tend to avoid linksys cards as I find the integrated antennas tend to be poor which can lead to difficulty in a variety of indoor situations. I've had decent success with D-Link. Netgear also isn't bad.

Whatever you buy, I'd reccomend buying one that does A/B/G if you can swing the extra dollars. You'll get more from your investment that way.

I'd say that you shouldn't buy a card that supports A unless you know you will be connecting to an A access point. Hardly anyone has an A access point.

That is starting to change as more and more 2.4GHz access points are out there interfering with each other. The 5GHz 802.11A spectrum is wide open. At my current abode, my neighbors have 7 other 802.11 B/G access points within range, all interfering with each other. So I use 802.11A and get great performance. I use the Netgear WAG511 which supports AES encryption, the highest available in the industry. And with Turbo mode, I get 108Mbps, not that I need it to access my DSL line, but more is better, right?

Thanks to all for the suggestions and info. Really helpful.

I would like to get a good quality card that handles all the current standards but may end up going for something cheap because this is just a temporary solution till the next laptop purchase in 6 months or so which will probably come with a good adapter.

Just bear in mind that most of the "built-in" ones are usually the intel-chipset based one's that while not bad, aren't nearly at the top either (they're designed to be more power friendly than performant).

I'll second the Netgear recommendation. I've had nothing but good results with their products.

Well, I ended up getting a Trendnet G card for about $22 after rebates from Buy.com. There were a lot of bad reviews on the cheap cards being sold at ecost, so I thought it best to avoid those. The Trendnet card seemed to have a relatively high ratio of favorable reviews and I noted that they had very recent driver updates posted on their support site, indicating good ongoing support.

Installed the card after downloading the latest driver and everything went smoothly. Card seems to work well. It sees my neighbor's encrypted B network, through two exterior walls and probably at least 150 feet away.

It picked up t-mobile's pay to use wi-fi at SFO, but I didn't feel like paying for it at the time. Will be trying to use it at SFO's RCC (do they have free access there?) and NRT's RCC tomorrow.

One thing I did have a little trouble with was in initially getting my browser to actually use the wi-fi connection. It kept wanting to use the default dial-up connection, even though the wi-fi connection was present. Anyway, I did eventually get it to work but I'm not sure of exactly what it was that did the trick.

Anyway, it is nice to be wi-fi enabled now and I'm looking forward to using it. Thanks again to all who responded to this thread.

I agree with the other posters suggestion that you get an a/b/g card, and I can recommend Netgear . . .but I have a Verizon CDMA aircard (cellular broadband) and I love it! $79 per month for unlimited access and their 3VDO network screams in the areas I travel to: DC and So Cal.

One piece of info you didn't include was what type of laptop you have. I'm not sure of your tech level, but if it's an older model it may have a 16-bit PCMCIA bus. Many newer cards are Cardbus, and use a 32-bit bus.

Laptops with equiped with 32-bit bus slots can use the older 16-bit cards, but 16-bit slots are not Cardbus compatible.

I will throw my vote behind Netgear as well. Their products are very reliable.

I second the recommendation to go inexpensive -b, as the laptop in question probably isn't top-shelf at this point anyway.

When you replace the laptop you'll get automatically upgraded to the new standard - just about every new model is -g/-b and some have a/b/g.

I used SMC for a long time no issues, same with Netgear. Any decent -b card will grab the signals in hotels and public areas.