I bought my Belkin wireless card as a middle of the range product, not too expensive, not too cheap. I bought two - one for me and one for my boyfriend.

The first one we installed was my boyfriend's. He's done this kind of thing before, and followed the step-by-step instructions to the word. It fitted into the slot fine, however when you switched on the computer and installed the software, it came up with error after error. Our initial thoughts were that there was a problem with the drivers, so we went onto the Belkin website and downloaded them again. This made no difference, and the wireless card software still came up with errors. Eventually we gave up after re-installing it, taking it out etc, and used his previous slower USB wireless card, which worked! Not the easy installation we had hoped for.

At the time we wrote it off as maybe the card not being compatable with his (high end brand new) PC, although it seemed unlikely.

A few months later I installed my wireless card into my desktop. There were a couple of glitches - when I tried to install the card, it didnt seem to fit into my computer, it took some pushing and it wasnt as easy as it should have been. I built my own computer so I know that fitting a wireless card should have been easier. Once it was in, the software worked fine, so I thought all was well. However, given about a day, the card started to disconnect me from the network every 10 minutes, which is very irritating!

Both of these incidents have made me realise it is probably not my boyfriends' or my computers which are faulty or incompatable - it is just that these cards are unreliable!

Later on I found out that my housemates had bought the same brand of cards, and some of them had had difficulty with them too.