NIC cards that will work with Vista - Need recommendations

I would like to upgrade to VISTA but I ran the Vista Advisor and it says my old 3COM NIC will not work under Vista and it is soooo old I doubt that it would ever be supported anyway. So time to buy a new card but which on? I have a 3MB DSL through Verizon and the NIC is running though my Linksys router and I would like to receive recommendations of brands and models of NIC's that are already certified to run VISTA. Any help would be appreciated.

Not quite suer if that would have anything to do with it, but Vista's networking functions have been completely rewritten. Oh, and every time there's a major OS upgrade driver support for older hardware is spotty at best. If you apply your logic, nobody would be using XP now (when it came out it had a slew of compatibility issues).

To the original poster, for the past couple years pretty much everything [a casual user] needs is built-in on the mobo. So maybe it's time for a more substantial upgrade - Vista and all (as in it is somewhat resource hungry and I imagine your mobo and thus probably processor are a bit dated).

I've used nVIDIA, 3Com, Marvell-based, Realtek-based, Intel, and Broadcom NICs on Vista. The most trouble I might have had would be to download the drivers off a web site. These have all been gigabit NICs though, so it's possible that some older ones which are no longer maintained will not have driver support. I might also have tried XP drivers at times.

This might be tricky if you only have one NIC and it doesn't work "out of the box" -- if you're upgrading a single computer you might want to set up dual boot or download the drivers beforehand.

If you want a recommendation -- Intel. Their NICs are generally good and well-supported, but sometimes harder to come by because they're a bit more expensive. You shouldn't spend a lot -- just shop a bit carefully so you don't spend more than needed.

I've also had good luck with Marvell NICs -- these are common and the driver support is also good. The PCIe gigabit version also performs very well.

$24 for a Realtek-based NIC is not a good choice when you could get an Intel for $30.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6833106121

There are many choices for cheaper Realtek-based GbE NICs -- here's one for $7:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6833180026

My question is how do you know what is an what is not going to be Vista compliant when going to buy the product? I have an rather new Linksys NIC but it also isn't compliant and there are a ton of NIC's out there for sale. I don't want to order something and not have it be compliant and have to fool around with returning the product. I would rather know up front that it works.

my Linksys LNE 100TX works great w/ RTM (didn't work w/ Beta2 or RC2) my onboard Marvell Gigabit adapter works to