I cannot begin to describe how I hate this card. It takes me AT LEAST 10 to 15 minutes to establish a connection after starting my laptop. First I need to go into Hardware Manager to sort out the initialisation problem that has to do with the IRQ clash as described elsewhere on this forum. (This I have to do each and every time after a restart). Only once that's been sorted out, can the dashboard be started (starting it prior to sorting out the IRQ problem, causes all sorts of other problems in dashboard, of which the all too familiar crashing of the software is an almost certainty). Often dashboard will not recognise the card. To solve this, I have to remove and re-insert the card. (Fortunately one doesn't have to go through the IRQ problem routine again if Windows hasn't been restarted – however, removing the card often causes dashboard to crash and once it's crashed, a restart of the laptop is compulsory, and once it's been restarted, the IRQ routine has to be carried out again. (Closing dashboard before removing the card sometimes prevents this, but other times dashboard hangs during the closing down process). And so it goes on and on and on. If the signal strength is marginal, the problems with dashboard increase exponentially! I don't even try to establish a connection if I have less than 20 min to half an hour – it simply cannot be done and as a result of which, the R599 a month my company is spending on the service, is to a large extend a waste of money. (I had very few of these problems with the Option card – only the occasional crashing of dashboard). Did I mention that I hate this card? I believe that Vodacom should immediately see to it that these cards are withdrawn from the market and replaced with the Option cards if they are really serious about their service, or even better still something that doesn't come with the Dashboard software.
