Best USB wireless adapter

[Nexo]

What is the best USB wireless adapter?

 

[ZetZet]

Wi-fi? There is no such thing as best when it comes to things.

[Nexo]

I mean like it won't degrade and pretty fast. 

[ZetZet]

I mean like it won't degrade and pretty fast. 

Read reviews. Newegg, amazon. If it's shit it will have two stars.

[Darkstar101]

Get Asus.

[Nexo]

How about the Amped Wireless ACA1?

[flibberdipper]

None. Nearly all of them are complete shit, and you should not buy them. The only ones I would give even a glance at are the ones that ASUS makes.

[kirashi]

What is the best USB wireless adapter?

 

The problem with wireless USB adapters is not the actual adapter hardware itself most of the time, but the often-buggy driver software provided by the manufacturer of said adapter. PCI/PCI-e based cards work better because most of the time you can goto the chipset manufacturer's site and use the drivers from them, rather than the so-so ones provided by D-Link, Linksys, Trendnet, etc.

 

When you purchase an adapter, it might have ASUS' name on the outside, but inside it's [usually] either a Broadcom Atheros, Ralink, or Qualcomm radio chip inside. ASUS will of course provide you with their driver CD or a download from their site, containing the base radio chip drivers often modified in some way or supplemented with some kind of WiFi Utility that you don't really need, as Windows has decent WiFi management built in, assuming it communicates with the WiFi radio chip OK. That's where it gets tricky. USB based WiFi adapters still use Broadcom Atheros, Ralink, or Qualcomm radio chips, but because they're communicating over a USB bridge instead of directly using PCI hardware lanes, some translation is required for the OS to understand what's going on. If the [modified] drivers are buggy or the manufacturer's utility is broken on your particular OS, you're out of luck until they release an update.

 

This is coming from my experience of owning a D-Link WUA-1340 Wireless G USB adapter, and even trying a friends better WUA-2340 adapter. Both of them officially support up to Windows Vista 64-bit operating systems, and worked like magic on my old Vista installation up until SP2 came out. That was when D-Link basically told their users to get stuffed and buy their "new updated" adapters (I forget the model numbers) which were uncovered to be using almost identical radio chips and software. The problem was that because the hardware ID's were different by a slight amount, the software would not allow you to install the drivers using their installation program. Luckily someone discovered what checksums to modify in the .INF files, and patched them, but ONLY for 32-bit Vista SP2 and 32-bit Windows 7.