D-Link DWA-131 USB 2.0 Wireless Nano Adapter

Comment:
I bought this because it was cheap and small. I didn't want to have to open the case to had wireless. So far so good, it worked right out of the box with Ubuntu 10.10 which was great. It works well in the house but the computer and router are close by. I still have to test it on different floor but right now I can see the neighbors WiFi so it should work fine.Would buy again

Comment:
The signal I got from this was full strength. I was using a pci card before but after changing the motherboard, I'm stuck with only 1 pci which is blocked by the GPU. The size of this is useful for sticking it at the back of the computer and forget about it. It doesn't stick out as much as some of the larger adapters. The only cons is that it usually gets very hot when I do a lot of browsing or online gaming... The ping I got using this ranges from 30-60 so it's not so bad.

Comment:
I was hesitating between buying the D-LINK DWA-556 or this, but at the end I picked this and it's a disappointment. I've been using for years the DIR-655 router and it worked fine for laptops. Recently I switched the computer located on a different floor than the router which was using a "one antenna" G wireless card that worked fine. The new computer is using this Nano USB Adapter and the signal was at 9% which is totally unusable (as I mentioned, the same location worked for the old one antenna wireless card). So I decided to use an ugly extension cable to extend the Nano USB Adapter all the way to the stairs (which is approximately 12 feet from the router). It now works at 74% signal strength, but then it would decide to drop  the connection once or twice every hour. It might be a driver issue but I'm already having enough headaches that I'm going to take my chance on the DWA-556 instead.

Comment:
I don't remember what I spent on it, but that doesn't matter much now because it works well and gives great transfer speeds.