I got this card to replace the venerable Lucent ORiNOCO 802.11b mini-PCI card that shipped with my laptop in 2002. The ORiNOCO works very well but a network that I need to connect to changed from WEP encryption to WPA. The ORiNOCO is too old to support WPA, so I needed a new card. I didn't particularly want to play guessing games with PCMCIA wireless cards and replacing the integrated card would not leave the card sticking out of the side of the computer, either. Intel's hardware is now driven completely by OSS drivers and as a result, support is excellent. The fact that this card was 1/2 to 1/3 of the price of PCMCIA cards was just icing on the cake. Intel might have screwed up with their RDRAM backing and the infamous PC100 Pentium 4 chipset (as well as most of the Netburst CPUs) but their NICs are among the best and certainly better than any other gear affordable to regular users.

This card was not officially supported by Intel on my old Pentium 4-M/845MP chipset laptop as Intel said it needs to be a Centrino unit (855GME/Pentium M Banias & Dothan 400, 915/Dothan 400 & 533, 945/Core Solo and Duo.) However, the card just needs a standard 3.3V, 33 MHz, 32-bit mini-PCI slot and an integrated antenna to function. My computer had both, so I popped the card in the computer and it was recognized by the system.

Installing the driver was easy as the ipw2200 driver it uses was already in the 2.6.17 kernel. Getting the firmware loaded took a bit of messing around with udev rules because the most recent ipw2200 firmware uses a different naming convention than udev's firmware_assistant knows. But once it got loaded, the card works very well. Wpa_supplicant can use the card (tell it to use the wext driver, not ipw2200) and it gives me very good throughput. It is much more sensitive than the ORiNOCO card that it replaced- almost as sensitive as my desktop's wireless bridge with a 6" antenna. It's the most powerful mini-PCI WLAN NIC Intel will release as the similar-in-features 3945ABG uses the new PCIe Mini Card slot.