I got this WiFi adapter primarily in order to take advantage of my new 802.11ac capable Netgear router. None of my laptops are capable of supporting these latest high-speed wireless standards, and I am not due for an upgrade for at least another year or so. So it’s nice to have this convenient and inexpensive interim solution.

The USB adapter is really small, barely larger than the smallest Bluetooth adapters that I had come across. It has a small keychain hole at its end, and thanks to this feature and its compact size it is very portable. The USB connection is neither too loose nor too stiff, and it attaches very firmly and securely to any of the USB ports that I had tried it with.

The installation software comes on a small-sized CD rom drive. This is a bit inconvenient, as many ultrabooks and laptops these days don’t come with a CD ROM. Among those that do, many don’t have a CD-loading tray that you open, but rely on inserting the CD into the automatically-loading CD/DVD slot, which oftentimes doesn’t work with the small-sized optical media. I think that having another small, inexpensive USB stick with the required software would have made much more sense as a way of distributing the requisite drivers.

Installing the driver software was very straightforward. The CD ROM comes with software for Mac, Windows (various flavors), and Linux OS. I’ve installed the software on an old Windows XP netbook and a three year old MacBook Air running Mavericks. It worked well with both of those machines. The installation instructions were easy to read and follow, and they were very clear about each step of the installation process. The CD ROM comes with additional instructions in multiple languages.

When it comes to performance this WiFi USB adapter really lives up to its promise. The file transfer speeds were very fast, and the adapter was able to pick up the WiFi signal much better than the internal WiFi antennas. I tried to download a couple really large (several gigs) files from the internet, and the download speeds I was getting were on par with the ones on my computers that are directly plugged into the router via ethernet cables. I streamed several HD movies from Netflix to my laptops, and they were all capable of being shown clearly and without any network issues.

This is definitely a wonderful little device and I would recommend it to anyone looking to either add WiFi connectivity to their computer or to boost the existing one. Highly recommended.