Customer Reviews

D-Link DWL-122 802.11b 11 Mbps USB Adapter

5 star:		(37)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(13)
1 star:		(26)

 

 

When I first bought my TiVo (about a year ago), I totally hated that fact that I had this forty foot phone cord running from my bedroom to the next room where I had to split the phone connection. After about a month of that madness, TiVo announced the launch of their new Series 2 network dial-in. So I bought this piece of equipment (the only USB to wireless internet I could find at Best Buy) and my TiVo recognized it immediately.

There has never been an issue with the device and I'm always getting at least a 60% signal, which registers as "Very Good" on my Tivo. Since TiVo announced that the Home Media Option was becoming standard on all boxes, I have never had a problem listening to music or viewing photos. I loved the setup so much that I bought a new TiVo for my sister last month and insisted that she buy the Dlink product. She has had no issue and her connection is nearly always at 90% or higher.

I couldn't see me having a TiVo until without this technology and just keep having tremendous success and no service interruptions with it. I am extremely pleased.

I tried to use this USB adapter with my Apple iBook laptop computer and a D-Link router (the DL-514). Unfortunately, it kept freezing my computer after a minute or two. It was also a little awkward in that when it was plugged into one of my USB ports, it blocked access to my available USB port. I put it on my TiVo and it worked fine to allow my TiVo to use my wireless network to access TiVo Central for daily data updates. Seems to work well with a TiVo series 2 DVR, but anyone contemplating this adapter for use with an iBook might wish to consider and Apple Airport Card and Apple Express base station.

This is what you need to connect TIVO with an XP Wireless system. TIVO updates the device and connects to your home network flawlessly. All you do is select the home network that TIVO finds and type in your password (WEP). If you don't have a password, ask your neighbor for help, he's probably on your network anyway.

Download the TIVO desktop, follow the instructions for what you want to do and the world is yours.

Nice concept. Completely portable. Pocket size. Wireless convenience.

I bought this unit so that I could connect some older machines wirelessly to our network at home, and also to my workplace's wireless network. It was advertised as compatible with Mac - and I had good experiences with our D-Link 614+ Wireless Router.

Using the latest drivers (1.3.2) for Mac OS X, on three different machines (brand new G4 1.25 GHz, older G3 533MHz & G4 630MHz, all with fresh installs of OS 10.2.6 or 10.2.8) I have had only very limited success. It initially works, giving a good connection, but within anything from several seconds up to an hour or two, the connection spontaneously drops and it does not reconnect. Sometimes it will only reconnect if I restart the computer. Often a simple disconnect& reconnect of the adapter gets the connection up...for a while. Without fail, I can't get through a day without the connected machine freezing completely (this should __never__ happen in OS X).

The control interface in the System Preferences sometimes displays incorrect/garbled information (wrong channel, WEP status says on when it is off, etc.)

In my opinion, as the D-Link's drivers for the DWL-122 are now, it is not reliable and not really usable on Macs. I have spoken with a Level 3 Tech person at D-Link, and gave him all my data & symptoms-he committed to passing on the information to the software/driver gurus at D-Link. Apparently, a fix is forthcoming...clearly though D-Link should have __never__ put this out on the market for Macs yet...so many of us are having headaches with it. It is most disappointing.

When they fix the drivers for the DWL-122 so that it works as well in OS X as it does on Windows, then it will deserve 5 stars, I feel. For now, only 2 stars, though.

I've got an old blue G3 mac that doesn't support Apple's Airport. I couldn't find any Mac compatible wireless cards other than Airport. The D-Link's USB adapter was the only wireless solution I could find.

I bought this adapter a year ago and initally had problems with it. It would work for five to ten minutes and then stop. I had to resart my Mac everytime it stopped working to get it to start again.

I downloaded the "latest" driver on D-Links web site, but that didn't help. I emailed D-Link's tech service, but their advice didn't work. At the same time, I posted my predictament on a few message boards. Someone responded with a link to download a current version of the driver (1.47) that wasn't on D-Link's site.

Since installing the new driver, I haven't had any problems with the adapter. It meets my needs and is fast enough for me. I would have given it five stars except that the tech support is lacking. There's no excuse for D-Link to not have the latest driver on their site, and no excuse for their tech support not to offer the updated driver.

I got this adapter for my Tivo to connect wirelessly to my home network. It works just fine. Note that Tivos are notoriously picky about which adapters will work. A previous reviewer suggested getting the DWL-G122, but I assure you it won't work. That is why I bought this one, and so far I'm really happy with it.

The actual hardware works fine. I've so far tested it under Windows XP and Linux. The drivers, as others have stated, lack polish. Under Windows XP the supplied D-Link utility is useless -- it won't even run. However, you can set it up using the normal XP wireless tools. If you download and install the wlan-ng package, it also works fairly well under Linux, but takes some hacking. I had to write a small script to delay the wlan-ng event handler's invocation of ifup, otherwise it tried to bring up the interface before a link to the wireless access point was established, and it failed.

I bought this because my old Prism card, the only one Linux understood of all my various wireless cards, did not do WEP. The DWL-122 uses a Prism 2.5 chip, so will do 128-bit WEP, but not the more secure 256-bit WEP.

Others have asked about signal strength. I was two walls away from my access point and I was getting 4 out of 5 bars at worst. You can also stick this on the end of a USB extension and move it around to find a stronger signal, which you can't do with a normal Cardbus adapter.

It's not fast, it's not fancy, but it does seem to work and is tiny and portable and runs everywhere even on desktop computers. So I'm keeping it. It is now my standard wireless interface.

All the newer series 2 units support this unit, my only wish would be for better reception.

I have a D-Link 11.g router. I needed an adapter for my TIVO. I bought and returned 5 different adapters before getting advice from TIVO on the ones to use. This was one supported. It worked instantly - no drivers, no nothing. I've not tested it for speed yet, but its getting 50% (good) signal.

Of course, if you have a 11.g compatible device I'd not go for this...go for the DWL-G122 or something else.

The small adapter comes with a (long) usb extension cord so it fitted easily into the back. Some I tried without the extension cord were a tight fit in the back.

I have a Mac Powerbook that I wanted to use with my 802.11b network at home. I was glad to hear of a wireless adapter that wasn't the Apple Airport that actually worked with a Mac. I looked at the reviews of some that said that this adapter didn't work with their Macs. I decided to give it a try anyway. When I installed the driver on the CD and put the adapter in the USB slot, the computer gave me an error message and asked me to reboot. Well, I decided to look on D-Link's website to see if there was an updated driver, and sure enough there was a new driver for the adapter. I installed it, and the adapter worked immediately. The adapter seems to have similar range to my other PCMCIA cards and seems to work pretty well.

Summary: If you have a Mac that you want to use this with, I would recommend that you download the latest driver from the D-Link website and install it instead of the driver on the CD. It will save you a little time and ensure that your adapter will work properly. Otherwise, this is a great wireless USB adapter.