Ubuntu and ndiswrapper

Anyone with a wireless card and linux knows that sometimes it can be a major pain in the backside trying to get drivers for any wireless card to work. Looking online, there are a gazillion number of howtos and how-not-tos...
My experience today had to be the easiest ndiswrapper installation in the history of linux. First the back ground and hardware:
My boss had an unused laptop that had been stripped of anything that could easily be removed. This meant when I got it, it had no hard drive, no memory, no wireless card. The only thing it came with was the main laptop itself and the power cord (it had the battery too which was 120% dead). The specs: Laptop PC, HP Pavilion ze4540us, 2.4GHz Celeron Mobile. I got a 60GB Seagate 5400.2 hard drive and setup a dual boot with Ubuntu 8.04 and XP Home. Today I got a miniPCI laptop card that I ordered from geeks.com, it goes by different names and model numbers:
MSI MS6855B 802.11g Wireless MiniPCI Notebook Card
Ralink RT2560F chipset (or rt2500 series)
The chipset is the main thing I was looking at as that is all that linux cares about.

The first thing I did was the same as everyone else, followed 5 or 6 different methods of installing ndiswrapper and driver from here or there or from CD or whatever. Using the CLI commands, by the time I was done, I had 5 or 6 unrecognized wlan adapters. Luckily the Gnome GUI made it easy to remove them.

This is what actually worked:
The closest I got was the instructions at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=563547 but that never quite worked either but it put me on the right track.

1) Copy 3 files from the driver CD (or extracted .exe file): what is needed is the .inf file, .sys file and .cat file, copy these to the "home" folder. In my case it was the rt2500.inf, .sys and .cat which were on the driver CD.

2) Open the Synaptic Package Manager in the System -> Administration area and search for ndiswrapper, choose the ndiswrapper-utils-1.9 to install and it will add the additional packages needed. Install these (Apply).
An alternative would be using the command line:
sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-common ndiswrapper-utils-1.9

3) Go to System -> Administration and now at the bottom you should see a "Windows Wireless Drivers" choice, open it.

4) Click the "Install New Driver" button and choose the .inf file. It will take anywhere from 2 seconds to 20 minutes to load this properly (mine took 2 seconds). Once it is loaded, it should show the wireless device to the left and say "Hardware present: Yes". In my case it shows "rt2500". Once this is done click close.

5) Provided you are connecting to an unsecured standard wireless connection with DHCP, this is it, done, finito! Go to the network manager to the upper right, left click it and choose the wireless connection (it will show the SSID of any signal found).
If you have a Static IP needed or WEP/WPA settings to add, go into the network manager and add whatever is needed to get connected.

One thing to remember is that the distance and signal strength is typically lower using the ndiswrapper than it may be in Windows so do not expect as good of reception or signal strength.

Five steps and it is done! Your experience may be different with different drivers and cards but mine worked very well.