Tale of three 802.11 b/g USB wireless adapters
With frequent changing of apartments it’s always a crap shot on whether the next bedroom/office will have a cable outlet or not. I was briefly considering purchasing a wireless bridge for my desktop machines, but then figured out since 802.11 b/g USB drives were so cheap nowadays, I might just as well go with those.
TRENDnet TEW-424UB was the first choice, since pretty frequently on CompUSA Web site the adapter will sell for $15 with a $10 rebate. Rebates for TrendNet are pretty reliable and come in the mail, but the adapter itself seems to be a total opposite. Its coverage seems to be quite spotty, and on my wife’s HP laptop with the drivers pre-installed it kept being recognized as some RealTEK networking product. Who knows, could be a Windows XP issue.
D-Link DWL-G120 (AirPlus Xtreme G Wireless USB Adapter 802.11g, 54Mbps) is also quite frequently on sale from Buy.com, which in combination with Google Checkout’s $10 off for new customers would sometimes yield you a free product. The driver for this guy has not been certified for Windows, of which you’re warned on installation, but little you can do at that point. Lack of certification seems to be appropriate considering the occasional blue screens of death the driver causes. Windows Error Reporting then redirects you to a page with generic “driver failure” message, which doesn’t help much. There’s not an updated version of a driver, nor a Windows-certified one.
What seemed to work for me flawlessly (so far) is ZyXEL ZyAIR G-220 - USB 2.0 802.11G Wireless Adapter & Soft-AP, which I generally got on Buy.com. The driver installation goes through pretty well, there’s an additional utility for wireless network management you can install, if you opt to use another one outside of Windows’ default. Right now they sell it for $27 with a $17 rebate (which is trackable online, and which I got). However, on Buy.com checkout screen there’s also an option to get a free magazine subscription. Opt out of that, and you’re eligible to receive a $10 rebate, bringing the price of the wireless adapter effectively to $0 (except for sales tax in California). I have not received that rebate yet, and it does seem kinda shady without online tracking. Nevertheless, so far this adapter seems to perform the best.