US Robotics 802.11g Wireless USB Adapter

In today’s world of complex operating systems with simple user interfaces, there’s no reason why connecting two or more computers together should force us to descend into a dark pit of networking jargon. But it’s surprising how many products tread this path. US Robotics’ Wireless USB Adapter, which will let your computer access a Wi-Fi connection, is an attempt to bypass all this with a superior user interface.

Features
The Adapter’s USB design means you can plug it into any kind of PC – desktop or laptop. It’s small enough to carry around – about the size of a cigarette packet – and is powered by the USB port so there’s no need for an external power supply. It supports the faster 802.11g standard of the Wi-Fi family, so can work at speeds of up to 54Mbps, but can restrict itself to the 11Mbps 802.11b standard if you’re trying to connect it to older technology. As well as its own connection software it comes bundled with Norton Personal Firewall and AdSubtract, which aims to speed up your internet access by blocking adverts.

Performance
Although it’s the ease of use that is this product’s main reason for existence, no corners have been cut in its performance. The 802.11g standard is noticeably faster than the previous version and, if you’re connecting to other 802.11g devices from US Robotics, you can make use of its ‘turbo’ feature, which brings the data transfer speed up to a theoretical maximum of 100Mbps.

Ease of use
If you have other US Robotics Wi-Fi devices installed and have never bothered to play about with your passwords and settings, the device will find and latch onto your network straight away. We don’t recommend this though – if you can do it, so can your neighbours. In our area it discovered two networks – ours and one of a mysterious Wi-Fi neighbour, both of which are encrypted. The US Robotics software even makes logging onto a protected network nice and simple though, with an easy wizard process that you’re certain to know all the answers to if you’ve already set a connection up. Otherwise you’ve got a bit of research to do, to learn the differences between SSID and WEP, which will involve referring to the CD-based manual.

Value for money
At £60 this is competitively priced, but shop around – at the time of writing it was available for less than £45 from Ebuyer (www.ebuyer.com). If you aren’t so fussy about the speed of your network you can find cheaper USB Wi-Fi devices, that use the older 802.11b standard.