I have used Belkin and also have another USB dongle type wlan adapter which does not have a name on it but the config program that came with it is zdlan !!
I have problems with both products they just aren't stable, keep loosing connection and frequently fail to initialise on start-up. Usually a combination of re-booting and/or running the config tool I manage to get it working but if I'm not around it drives the wife and kids barmy with frustration.
I also have a Dell laptop with built-in wlan and I never have a problem so I'm confident that my wlan router is OK
Anyone else have similiar issues with USB wlan devices or no of a good reliable make ???
USB wifi adaptors are best avoided. It's not a particularly good technology for the purpose.
You haven't said what type of computer is involved, but a better solution would be a PCI or PCMCIA card installed in the machine. Cisco makes good products for this.
The computers are an old dell 640 LT and a PCworld Accent. I have used PCMCIA in the past and agree they are much much better than USB, but the Dell PCMCIA slots are broken and the Accent doesn't have any which seems to be the trend with new LT..
IME an awful lot of the USB devices perform poorly. Many are also let down by poor configuration software.
There are a couple that I have used that are not too bad. One is a Pheenet:
formatting link
the supplied software though and use the windows stuff. Range and stability are ok.
The other that was not too bad was one of the "soap on a rope" style USB devices by Belkin. The particular model is no longer made, but later ones may be as good.
If you have a PCMCIA option then go for that - they usually perform much better.
USB seems to be a pile of cack to me. It really does deserve the "plug a= nd pray" monica. I have a Win2k PC here that has a variety of USB devices used with it, MP3 player, camera, memory stick, PDA. Around 50% of the time if you plug something in it's either "new hardware" or the software= that is supposed to talk to it can't find it even though the PC knows it= is there.
I get the feeling that some software for some bits of hardware doesn't u= se the standard interface but uses "other means" and this breaks other software for other hardware.
Up shot, USB is not stable or reliable. Why not just get a PCI WiFi card= , they can be had for the same =A310 to =A320 price range of unreliable US= B things.
Belkin is crap to start with. I've got a pair of Netgear WG111T adaptors here and both have worked well (although I don't use them often) - again, don't use their own software, just install the drivers, and uses the standard Windows setup.
I've no problems with USB. I use it for scanner, printer, card reader (mainly for camera), memory stick and Ipod, using XP Pro. XP does seem a lot more understanding of USB than it's predecessors, although in general I'm no fan of M$...
Just to annoy Andy Hall, the XP laptop I got back in April and the built in wireless networking have all worked fine since then. No need to reinstall anything on a regular basis, contrary to what was claimed would happen when we had a discussion on the matter a year or so ago, it's all just worked. USB keyboard, mouse, UPS (predates the laptop), 2 HDs, camera all fine.
My wife's XP laptop has worked similarly well - though it's somewhat older - and the cheap and nasty USB wireless device hasn't presented any problems at all. Claims its an EDUP one.
USB in general is usually ok (unless you have a older mobo with a dodgy USB chipset as some had at one time). But USB and the tiny WiFi dongle style adaptors seems to be a weak area. Possibly down to the low selling price of these units.
One other limiting factor was the lack of standards for USB at one point - IIRC USB 2.x set an upper limit of 500mA, by which point many hardware devices, such as the "frog" USB modem could take considerably more.
Some motherboards had resettable fuses (mainly in software IIRC, but required a reboot), others killed all USB ports permanently...
One option is to try and see what chipset is in the devices - you can then try and download driver software from the chip manufacturers site. Sometimes this is newer, more stable and hasn't been buggered around with as much as the OEM's driver.
You can find out who made the device by going into device manager >
properties > details > hardware ID's. You will then see a bit which says VEN_something and DEV_something.
Note the Vendor and Device ID's.
Now go to
formatting link
and put the two codes in and it will tell you the manufacturer and the part number of the chip.
stevelup wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@e4g2000hsg.googlegroups.com :
Agreed. I have considerable experience with D-Link USB consumer wireless kit. Recent products use a Realtek chipset; earlier ones used Atmel. In almost all cases there is/was a more recent driver available from the chipset manufacturer's site.
However, while this may be a workround for technically able users or as part of a well-documented set of 'fix' instructions, it's not really acceptable for the man-in-the-street. Support from (all) product vendors is poor in my experience - they have moved on to selling the latest and greatest new wonder product while leaving earlier, still capable devices languishing... But such is commercial life.
FWIW my experience with USB wireless devices is that they are no better or worse than PCMCIA or MiniPCI or MiniPCIExpress or whatever the latest device is. In wireless networking, positioning is everything. High up and central is good; low down in a corner is bad. And a USB dongle on the end of a cable can often help with improved signal quality, as it enables the device (and hence the antenna) to be better positioned than the PC or laptop.
[Aside: I've not yet used an 802.11n (well, draft 802.11n) device in a laptop - cards are available (eg from Gigabyte) + third antenna. This may well offer an improvement in difficult signal areas because of the MIMO technique and may well offer an improvement - at a price of course, since it will require a network upgrade]
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