Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsWorks but you might need to do some troubleshooting
Reviewed in the United States on September 18, 2013
Right off the bat I'll say that you should prepare yourself to do some troubleshooting, which might include moving your device closer to the wireless signal.
It's very small, doesn't seem all the fragile as some have mentioned (I ended up removing it from USB slots and re-inserting it a bunch of times in a short time span with no apparent loss of fidelity), and the driver installed just fine. For the first couple of hours it seemed to work great. That's when I started to have problems.
For some unknown reason, the signal strength weakened down to 50%. We have several other devices that can link to our router wirelessly and none of them were having any issues from that same spot. I messed with numerous settings with no luck and made sure all of our other wireless devices were off. At this point, the desktop it was plugged into is a couple rooms away, maybe about 25 ft from the router. I decided to unplug it and install it on the desktop right next to the router. Blammo, no problems at all, signal strength good, connection quality equally as good. I left it like that for a while, even downloaded some stuff, trying to see if I could get it to crash, and it never did; it worked just fine.
So, after browsing forums and the manufacturer's site, I decided the only thing left for me to do was to try moving the device closer to the router. Fortunately, I found a spot only a few feet away from where I originally wanted it and -- surprise! -- it worked just fine.
After all that, it seems to be working fine enough for what I want to use it (although the signal strength is still only at about 70%). My recommendation is that it's definitely good for it's price, but it's not the best thing in the world, and if something goes wrong, expect to be doing a lot of troubleshooting and most likely finding very little in terms of assistance.
EDIT - Now, once again, I am having connection issues despite ZERO changes to the organization of all equipment involved. Can't say I'm too happy about this. If I figure anything out and it starts working consistently, I'll change the review score.
