|
It was easy to install, so I was up and running very quickly, and it has met my needs and out-perfomed my expectations. I'd recommend this device highly. Laptop reception in the Hawking's location is spotty at best, but the signal from the Hawking unit is strong. I'm in a rental house, which is inadequately hard-wired for a network. Using a Belkin pre-N wireless router which has been in the family for a number of years. I haven't had to move the antenna at all to improve signal strength.I am not a highly technical person.
Better than some perhaps but no techie. I was afraid I would have poor performance going wireless but have been pleasantly surprised by this wireless adaptor.Not a gamer so fast downloads are not necessarily a requirement for me. I am almost as far away from the router as I can be in a 4000 square foot plus house. Is it the antenna. However, speed is pretty good. I have been using this little device for over six months.
Reception has been good to great. I don't know.
I even attached an USB extension cord to the adapter to try and move the adapter around (higher, lower, closer to a window, etc). it has an antenna on it. Every location I tried (at home, friends house and work) failed to match the signal strength of my laptop.Setup was easy and the included software worked fine. Sadly, the adapter's range was less than the range of my laptop's built-in wireless functionality. On its own; however, it's not worth it. How could it be any worse than what I already have built-in.
Maybe with a more powerful antenna I would have seen an improvement. I bought the Hawking HWUG1 Wireless G USB adapter hoping I could extend the range of my laptop. I read the reviews and thought that maybe my laptop had a compromised range already and this would help, heck. but it didn't help at all.
He even gave me the one that gave me the best results.wasn't doing him much goodI went to Kauai and the place I was staying had WIFI with a weaker signal. I installed the software at home with no issue and it worked fine. If you find somthing better let me know He told me that he had shopped around and had poor luck with getting much boost any of the ones he had bought (4). All were WEP, WAP'ed and WOOP'ed looking for MAC daddies so I couldn't test them out for speed.At my tough location at work I saw an improvement but not much. The MacBook did better than the HWUG1.I put the HWUG back in the bag for the rest of the stay.I spent a lot of time reading up on the different ones. The software does let you see the signal strength which Mac does not.
Good luckWould I buy it again.probably not. It is nice to be able to screw in other antennas.all-n-all not much reason to buy it. The cool part of the HWUG1 is I could just screw the cable in to the USB module. I have a MacBook that has good WiFi and I have no complaint but I wanted a boost to get this tough signal. I was able to pick up a number of other wifi's in the area that I hadn't seen before with mixed strength (with my Mac or PC). The end result is none of his antennas gave me much of a boost although they were bigger and I could aim them where as the HWUG1 was limited.
All claim to be the best. Good luck. So I'm looking for an Improvement in signal for a tough location at work surrounded with steel. A co-worker had all sorts of USB wifi antennas that he had been testing at home with little to no results and let me try some of them. with the most Db.
The Hawking was easy to setup and worked right out of the box.The only complaint I have it that is is rather bulky when attached to the side of my laptop. It works great.I purchased the adapter because my HP laptop, on board, wireless stopped working. I have to be careful not to accidentally pop or break it off if I'm moving the laptop around.
The only way (after hours of trying, emailing and calling) was to load the driver by itself. So it works a little bit better than the built-in antenna in the laptop.I had to return the first G adapter. BTW, Configurating the setting of the protocol isn't mentioned in the quick start guide and the device won't work if not properly configured. If I recall correctly, I don't believe that the software from their website includes the manual. I detected a bit of "attitude" in their responses. It draws enough power that it doesn't work on every one of the USB ports.
I then asked them if the file was AegisP.sys or rt73.sys and they responded by NOT answering my question but instead asking me if I also had a problem loading on Vista. Perhaps I am overly impatient in expecting a straight answer to a straight forward question. And then after loading the driver separately loading the utility. The quick start documentation was weak, doesn't exactly match the software and if you follow it you probably won't be able to get it to load or to operate. Make sure to read the manual that comes on the CD. Read the manual.I'm on a laptop and the adapter draws quite a bit of power.
My memory sticks, printer, and camera card reader don't get warm and they work on any port. I found that if I followed the doc to load the driver and utility together that the driver was missing a critical file. I think that the half-wave dipole antenna gives a few dB of gain. Maybe my pc wasn't designed to handle such high amounts of current draw. The USB plug was intermittent. Perhaps I should have sympathy for them - - maybe they don't know what the driver name is or know their own product very well (but that's just my own opinion).
I was loading onto an XP platform. I still ended up with a missing driver warning but I was able to get past it (eventually) but with essentially no help from their tech support. I eventually (and by myself) found the rt73.sys file had been installed in an obscure location on the hard disk and their software didn't know where to find it. Bottom line: If you are willing to buy a product with bad documentation, poor/ineffective tech support (you're basically on your own), with software that is a bit quirky, and with hardware that draws a bit of power in order to get a few dB of improvement then this is the product for you. I was disappointed with the Hawking G adapter.
I asked tech support for the file name of the missing driver and they didn't answer me but instead asked me if I tried loading it on another pc. It gets pretty warm to the touch.
|
