Hey, I'm a Londoner currently living in Staffordshire attending uni. I'm just a student who loves go...
Hey, I'm a Londoner currently living in Staffordshire attending uni. I'm just a student who loves going out, having fun with mates, playing the odd videogame, watching movies and writing! Nice to meet ya!
Member since:30.10.2006
Reviews:18
Members who trust:1
I've been using this ever since I started sharing a house with some of my university friends. This came bundled along with a Netgear wireless router and I got "stuck" with it as my room's upstairs and therefore out of reach of the ethernet cable.
I have to say even though it's a bit of a troublesome product it hasn't failed me yet. If there was a stable Internet connection this has always picked up the signal and has been giving me reliable Internet for going on 2 months now.
This comes packaged along with a CD to install the relevant drivers and some software to pick up on signals from the router to establish a connection to the Internet. It's all pretty straight forward and shouldn't be too much of a problem to install, the instructions are quite clear and the only thing you could really mess up on is plugging the USB stick in before installing the drivers, in which case you'll have to uninstall everything and start over from scratch.
Once the drivers and software are installed, you create a profile (which I think is a bit pointless since there aren't really any settings to tweak, but whatever) and you're soon ready to go.
Now, the problem is, even though a signal is established it's rarely a good one. The only time I've got a half decent signal is when I used my friends ethernet extension cable and brought the router upstairs. It was literally right next to the router, and even then I didn't get a full signal. When the router's downstairs I never get a signal higher than "Low", and occasionally have to settle for "Very Low". Strangely, this doesn't noticeably effect the Internet, or maybe I've just gotten used to the speed. Rarely when I'm downloading things I'll sometimes get constant speeds of around 400kb/s, and on our 2MB line that's not too shabby at all. It's very hot and cold though, as it's not unusual to get constant speeds of under 10kb/s, and remember this will largely be down to your Internet connection at home.
The LED light on the stick is a nice touch but can be annoying in a very dark room. If I leave my computer on to download something overnight the blinking LED literally illuminates the whole room when it flashes, this can be very annoying and I usually have to cover it with something. This also isn't very aesthetically pleasing to look at since it's quite big and bulky, it's about the size of a regular USB stick but for something that's supposed to be left in pretty much permenantly there's always that risk of someone accidently hitting it, which could snap it in half as it's not very durable.
This could be down to my own computer errors or settings, but a problem I can't seem to resolve is that whenever I start up my computer the adapter will never work from the get-go. I have to take it out, wait for Windows to acknowledge that it's been unplugged, and then plug it back in again. After this it works fine. Again it could just be my own settings but it's something I can't really get my head around, even through reinstallation.
Other than that I can't really complain, it does it's job save for the little nuisances I have with it, and at £34 it's not badly priced. If it was any more of a headache I would probably invest in another memory stick but since it does provide stable Internet I can't really complain. I'm not sure I would use this if I didn't get it for free.
So, I can't really recommend this to anyone unless you're on a bit of a budget and tolerant of devices that like to be stupid sometimes.
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funny i came across this tonight as mine literally just arrived in the post today. I've been borrowing my brothers for months and really like it (although i agree about the aesthetic thing - i just plugged mine in round the back of my desktop). i also have the startup issue occasionally but not regularly and the flashing at night....don't get me started lol!!! ben
Nov 2nd, 2006
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