ORiNOCO's client products have a reputation for not disappointing purchasers and after putting the PC Card Gold through its paces, I have to agree...

The PC Card uses the Agere Systems chip set (formerly Lucent Technologies), and has a fixed position, non-removable antenna.  The antenna has a "hump" that would interfere with a card next to it, so you'll probably need to put it into the top PCMCIA slot of your laptop.  The card has two LEDs which indicate card power and wireless LAN activity. There's also a removable cover on the end of the card's antenna hump that conceals a small antenna connector.

Update 7/23/01 The Antenna connector type is proprietary to ORiNOCO.  See this page for information on obtaining adapters.

If you want to add desktop clients that don't have PCMCIA card slots to your wireless network, ORiNOCO has both ISA-to-PCMCIA and PCI-to-PCMCIA adapter cards available.  However, you need to buy both the PC Card LAN card and the adapter of your choice, raising the cost of adding a wireless station by $50 to $60 over just the cost of the PC Card itself.  You'd be better off using the USB Gold adapter, since you don't have to crack open your PC's case to install it.  See the USB Gold's review if you want more info.

There are PC Card drivers for a wide range of OSes, including the usual Win 95/98/NT/Me/CE/2000 plus MS-DOS, Linux, and MacOs. NetWare users will have to go elsewhere for their LAN card needs, however, since there's no driver for them.

Driver installation went smoothly on my Win98SE Compaq 1650 laptop. I inserted the PC card into the laptop, Plug & Play detected the card and installed the drivers.  During the driver install, a Configuration profile Edit screen (see below) will come up, which you need to complete correctly or your card won't be able to communicate with the wireless network.  A popup screen near the end of the driver install will tell you to install the Client Manager, but doesn't start the install.

The ORiNOCO client products have perhaps the best set of Client utilities of any of the products I've tested.  They're so good, that I recently standardized on using the Gold PC card for all my Access Point and Wireless Router testing.

The Client Manager is a System Tray application used to monitor the wireless link quality and set connection parameters (see the screen shots below).  The CM's System Tray icon (not shown below) is similar to a cell phone signal indicator, dynamically showing the number of "bars" of signal.  Putting the cursor over the icon gives you a reading of signal "Condition" and the bandwidth mode currently being used, so you can get just about all the information you need about the signal state without opening the CM Window.  Check out the screen shots below to get a feel for the CM. (click on any image to open another window with a full-sized view)

The Link test and Site Monitor utilities are probably the best I've seen yet.  They actually give you signal, noise and signal-to-noise readings.  The Link Test Test History view shows a nice little plot over time and readings can be saved to a log file. The Site Monitor feature lets you monitor multiple wireless stations, sorted by various parameters.  You can also run a card diagnostic from the CM.

Despite all these goodies, there are a few things you should be aware of. You can't set the data rate in any mode, and the settings in Peer-to-Peer mode are very basic.  About all you can do is set a network name, enable/disable Encryption and enter ONE WEP key.  ORiNOCO is clearly biased toward using the clients in an Infrastructure, (Access Point) based network.

I ran performance tests using the D-Link DWL1000AP Access Point as the test partner.

(Details of how we tested can be found here.) 

Comments: The data shows consistent throughput performance over the tested range, except for Condition 4, where the SNR is causing the link speed to adjust downward.

SNR readings for Conditions 2 through 4 were lower than measured for the USB Gold, and got low enough to impact transfer speed  for Condition 4.  This is a direct result of the better antenna orientation (vertical vs. horizontal) and placement of the USB's antenna vs. the PC card's.

I found an approximately 20% throughput degradation with either 64 bit WEP encryption applied.  Not as bad as the 50% I typically find, but not the 0 to 5% found with some products either!