D-Link DWA-556

Deadjohn: #d_link_dwa_556 Performance degraded after about one month of use. Signal strength degraded to < 63% even when next to modem. Tech support was non-existent. Refused to honor warranty while blaming OS, IE8, and everything else but aliens. Can't recommend. Jul 12, 10

azadian: #d_link_dwa_556 This seemed to work OK under Linux, though I didn't test it extensively.

I tried for months to get it to behave under Windoze XP SP3, without success. I have an unknown source of interference in my environment which I have not yet been able to track down. With my other equipment, it is only a minor annoyance, but it renders this card, under XP, nearly unusable. Sometimes it will maintain the connection for minutes at a time, but that is the exception. Signal is very weak, and thruput is low. For comparison, my old (MSI) 802.11g PCI card in the very next slot of the same computer gets an excellent signal, has about 4x the thruput, and seldom (briefly) drops the connection.

Twice I tried to get the latest drivers to work in my machine, and each time it took me hours to back them out so that Windoze would boot.

The manager program doesn't remember the key, so my family had to re-enter it after every boot.

The support people did try to help, but they are saddled with an incredibly bad online case reporting program. They can send me emails, but I can only respond through their system, and that is so bad I couldn't figure out how to update my own case. Mar 11, 10