Tiny Little USB Wifi Network Adapters

[DaveMcLain]

Recently I bought an Asus USB-N10 wireless adapter for an old laptop that my dad uses. The built in wifi card had stopped working correctly and he needed something that he could leave plugged in and didn't stick out from the side a long way.

The card is incredibly tiny and it seems to work quite well. There are a lot of very similar adapters on the market and I was wondering if SNB had thought about reviewing a few of them?

I think that all of the ones I saw on the Compusa web site were listed as "N-150" so that might be a problem for some users.

 

[thiggins]

I'm aware of the products, Dave. There is not that much interest in wireless adapter reviews given that so many products come with Wi-Fi built in.

 

[sfx2000]

Recently I bought an Asus USB-N10 wireless adapter for an old laptop that my dad uses. The built in wifi card had stopped working correctly and he needed something that he could leave plugged in and didn't stick out from the side a long way.

The card is incredibly tiny and it seems to work quite well. There are a lot of very similar adapters on the market and I was wondering if SNB had thought about reviewing a few of them?

I think that all of the ones I saw on the Compusa web site were listed as "N-150" so that might be a problem for some users.

I've seen a few of them, and actually have one handy - the Buffalo WLI-UC-GNM USB adapter...

Most are USB 2.0 Ralink chipsets - B/G/Singe Stream N - limited sensitivity due to the small antenna, but they work fine as long as you're within decent range of the AP.

Most will have Win7/Vista/XP drivers, and at least with the Buffalo, it's plug and play with Ubuntu 11.10 as the Ralink drivers are built in...

Tim - always appreciated your periodic adapter (Client/STA) reviews - if you can include something like this on the next round, I think folks would find value... see the interest that folks had on the recent TrendNet 3-stream client review.

 

[stevech]

I use one of those itty-bitty USB/WiFi in an old laptop that lacks WiFi, and runs XP. Works OK, though of course its speed vs. range is comparatively limited.