usb adapters

I have had a nice WiFi network using an Orinoco card at home for the past two years. The PCMCIA slot in my laptop suddenly stopped working and I was stuck. Thankfully, I learnt of USB based WiFi adapters - I approached this rather cautiously as I was concerned about compromising range. The early reviews indicate limited range with USB based adapters as compared to PCMCIA cards.
I got this device for $29.99 after rebate..(at a local retailer who is the best buy I know :-)). This worked really fine out of the box. A pleasant surprise, the wireless range is amazing.

I have my SMC router on the second floor..my office is in the basement. The get great signal strength while in the office ...I clocked the transfer speed at 2.5 Mbps in speed tests. Not bad! As good as what I used to get with my Orinoco Gold PCMCIA based card which is believed to have the best range in its class.

I would strongly recommend this to anyone.

A word of caution. I suggest you download the latest version of the driver available at the D-Link site. The latest version (v 3.00.04 for Win2000) is much better than what was shipped with the item.

Tested this against a D-link 614+ 802.11b wireless router and after a few teething issues (more on that later) got it working just fine. When the router is in the same room as the DWL 122, I get a 100 % connection rate, after moving the router a few rooms away, the connection rate drops to about 75 % but that doesn't really affect the upload/download speed in the slightest (1200/300). (I tested the speeds using the speed test tool at www.dslreports.com).

I had some problems getting it connected initially, the problems though were mostly caused due my ham handed go-it-alone configuration attempts. Wouldn't have been difficult if I hadn't tried to set the SSID/WEP/MAC address filtering from the get go. Called up the tech support when I was totally frustrated, and spoke to an extremely rude operator, who obviously din't know the first thing about the products. Luckily on my second attempt, got this nice gentleman who managed to untangle my mess and get me up and running.

My reason for giving it 5 stars:
1. I din't want to penalize D-link for my clumsy configuration attempts,
2. The connection is so strong and sweet, couldn't find any fault with it,
3. The DWL 122 looks pretty nice and is easily hidden from view.

My rig:
PIII 450 Mhz, Win 2000, SBC YAHOO DSL

D-Link DWL-122

I've recently bought the D-link 802.11b wireless router for my home and installed the router(in DHCP mode) in minutes. I've connected my Sony VAIO with no hassles.

My Compaq desktop (Windows 2000) desktop doesn't have the wireless capability and I bought the new D-link (DWL-122) Wireless USB adaptor. I preferred the D-Link adaptor over the Netgear USB adaptor because the same company products may work fine. Unfortunately, it doesn't. I put the installation CD and the Installation application popped up and clicked the Install button. Then I got an error message from Windows Installer and obviously the Microsoft error message doesn't help anyway. So I reinstalled the Windows installer and the installation application did run.

Then I plugged the USB adaptor and the hardware has been recognized by the system and I configured the USB adaptor and the signal strength was around 70%. That was awesome? huh!, apparently not. I have to restart my computer to get the IP Address configured and everything seems good finally. Then I started browsing yahoo, amazon, bbc.co.uk sites. After couple of minutes, the browser started hanging(for more than a minute) and still the signal strength around 70% in my adaptor. The Router is just 30 feet away from my desktop.

The USB adaptor is consistently failing to connect to the router at regular intervals and sometimes it doesn't connect at all.

Finally I've lost my patience and returned the product.