Netgear PA-301 10MBps Phoneline PCI Adapter Card

Average customer rating: 2.5

Not worth the eventual frustration.
Excellent product
Can't tell you how bad this thing is
Stay away from this card!
fragile little board

Netgear PA-301 10MBps Phoneline PCI Adapter Card

Manufacturer: Netgear
Product Group: CE
Binding: Electronics
ASIN: B00003G1LP

Related Categories:

Phone Line Networking

PCI Network Cards

Phone Line Networking

PCI Network Cards

Accessories

| Netgear | Brands | Electronics Features | Electronics

Amazon.com Product Description

The PA301 PCI phone-line adapter from Netgear turns your home phone lines into a high-speed computer network. You can link your PCs to a single Internet account and share files and printer access without installing any new wires. The built-in telephone line splitter means you can use the phone even when using the network.

Simply install the Netgear PA301 adapters into your computers and plug them into a phone line. Within minutes the cards in your PCs can exchange data and share Internet access. If you swap files, the Netgear PA301 takes approximately 20 seconds to transfer a 15 MB file. Netgear provides a limited lifetime warranty on parts and labor.

Product Description

NETGEAR Phone line adapters allow you to turn the existing phone lines in your house into a high-powered computer network. Install the adapters in your computers, plug them into a telephone wall jack (phone cable is included in the package) and within minutes you can play games, share files, printers, and even Internet access simultaneously among all the computers in your home just like you do at work or school. All this without installing any new wires in your home. NETGEAR's "do-not-disturb" technology designs are conscious of your phone use so you can enjoy continuous data exchange without any disruption to your phone service.NETGEAR brings the latest technology to the home consumer market and makes it possible to have a 10 Mbps network equivalent to the typical corporate network connection. Now you can share files and data between home computers at the speed and efficiency of a professional network cutting down on time wasted by slower speed technologies. The adapter allows the PCs equipped with the adapter to instantly turn their phone lines into high-speed backbone for printer, file, or Internet sharing. NETGEAR also provides the technology to allow you to simultaneously talk on the phone while you are exchanging data between computers! FirstGear software provides everything you need to share modems that are connected to your PC so that the other computers equipped with NETGEAR phone line adapters can all access the Internet simultaneously over the home phone wiring using only a single Internet account.

Customer Reviews:

Not worth the eventual frustration........2004-01-20

I had written a prior review last March with 5 stars, and it came back to bite me. I had bought 2 of these in April 2002, and they worked great for just about a year. Shortly after I wrote my first review, one just died completely, and about a month later the second one started acting up. Other reviewers have had the same problem with it, and I wouldn't have normally cared, except the aggravation I went through with Netgear. Their tech support at several levels was a total waste of time (several hours and days). Granted, they were all polite on the phone, but it seemed they have a "pre-programmed/robotic" response and trouble shooting steps, which had me going in circles over and over again. Never did any one ever even acknowledge that the card could actually have "died", and thus did not want to stand by their so called "life time warranty". I could only blame myself for going through that tech support charade. I have since abandoned phoneline networking, in favor of wireless. I have put Netgear in the same "outcast" category as Linksys,... and Hail to (that's how I spell networking relief) D-L-I-N-K.

Excellent product.......2003-03-24

I bought two of these cards to network both my children's computers which sit in each of their bedrooms at one end of the house. The card physically is very easy to install, provided you have an empty PCI slot (if not, then use PA-101 USB adapter). One computer runs W98SE, and the second runs ME. The driver CD works fine, even better with ME since driver installs automatically. It plugs into any working phone jack, and you're all networked and ready to surf the net. Everything needed is included in the package. You can be on line and still use your phone without any degradation in either signal. The 10X connection is quite fast and not noticeably different than your 10/100 wired ethernet connection. I have a broadband cable modem, hooked to my router. One of my router's LAN ports is hooked a phoneline bridge (Netgear PE102, another great product), and the bridge to a phone jack. I definitely recommend this card, with a bridge, if you want to set up a home phoneline network.

Can't tell you how bad this thing is.......2002-12-23

I have gone through 3 of these. Every time there is a power failure while my PC is on, it fries this card. Tried using customer service the 1st time it happened. Took forever to convince them it was fried even though I could prove that it did not work in more than one PC. When the replacement was never delivered (most probably a FedEx problem) company ignored my request to ship a replacement and take the problem up themselves with UPS. This is the last Netgear product I ever buy.

Stay away from this card!.......2002-02-27

I bought two of these in September 2001, thinking to network multiple PCs and share a broadband connection. Installation was a pain, requiring me to pin an IRQ in the BIOS for a Windows Me machine. The board ran-- for one day-- and then died. I got the other one working intermittently until I upgraded to Windows XP. Under XP, for one glorius month, everything worked great. In January, my machine locked up and the board stopped working.

I tried everything, including doing a complete reinstall of Windows 95 on a spare machine, to determine if it was XP. It wasn't. Neither board worked on a simple Windows 95 setup. I have a computer background and I even tried debugging the device driver initialization before determining that the boards were fried.

Buy another vendor's product.

fragile little board.......2002-01-22

One little power glitch, and the board is fried. Look for some other networking solution. I have 3 98se machines and an ME machine I attempted to hook together. I've gone through 10! of these boards trying to keep them online. If your digital clocks have ever flashed at you, don't buy this product. You'll be going through these boards like [crazy]. I've been using PC's since 1984, and I've never seen boards fry like this.

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