Card Management

The good news is that the Client Manager (Figure 2) that comes with the card looks nice. However, I had a rough time getting it and WinXP to get along.

Figure 2: Client Utility

The version that came with the card seemed to cause the card to cycle between connection and disconnection from an AP about every second or so and require a few boots to get the card to properly lease IP address info. When I pointed this out to SMC, they quickly sent a BETA copy of a newer version. The new copy at least didn't cause the rapid connection / disconnection, but I still had to do multiple boots and card ejects / inserts to get things working. I'll also note that the card never showed up in XP's System Tray "Safely Remove Hardware" utility, so I had to just pop it out of my notebook without properly shutting it down.

As shown in Figure 4, the Utility gives you access to commonly used settings such as WEP encryption, Transmit rate, card mode (Infrastructure, AdHoc), and ESSID. You'll need to go to the Advanced Network adapter properties, however, to get to settings like Preamble mode, RTS threshold, etc.