I have had an older Netgear MR814 routher for some time, using it in conjunction with a Netgear MA401 card in a Dell Latitude L400 laptop. This has worked fairly well, the range isn't great but it gets me around the house.
I recently bought a refurbished Netgear WGU624 with the idea I would eventually upgrade the card in the laptop so that both could use the G or 108Mbs speeds. I also thought the range might improve. Anyway, as I was away most of the summer I never got to hooking up the new router fro a couple of months. Once I did I had a few difficulties, but eventually got it running and upgraded with the latest firmware. Now, I'm still using my original card in the laptop, so I'm still at
802.11b. The range is abysmal. If I move 20 feet from the router, the signal drops 50%. If I go 1 floor away, I lose it completely. It is in the same location as the old router. So it is unusable for wireless. I hooked the old router back up, my thought being I can at least keep the new one for a hard-wire backup for my home network as I can't return it.Netgear support will not help me, and that is another, very disappointing story (can you spell "off-shoring"). Suffice it to say I will never buy another Netgear product, and I have always used them, but I can't support companies that do this (I know, pretty soon I won't be able to buy anything). But I digress...
My question is: do you think the problem is the mix of an older card with the newer router, or just a bad router? Is it worth it to get a G card? Has anybody had good luck with this router? Is there any kind of a tweak that might help?
-Jim