Hawking Wireless

In one of my past postings, I reported having trouble with my Linksys wireless adapter. The network adapter card would have trouble making and holding a connection. I narrowed the problem down to a bad PCMCIA port on the laptop.

A few weeks ago, I started looking into USB wireless adapters and found many to choose from. My biggest concern was that my old HP laptop, which only has a USB1 port, could connect at wireless-G speeds. All of the USB network adapters support USB2 (high speed) ports, but none state that you can get 54Mbps connections using a USB1 (low speed) port.

After looking around a bit, I found a reasonably priced model from Hawking Technology that had received good customer reviews. The HWUG1, 2.4Ghz Wireless-G USB 2.0 Network Adapter has a unique removable antenna. Best Buy actually had the lowest price at $35 bucks. So, last weekend I purchased one to see how it would work on my laptop. At first I had trouble getting it to connect, so I downloaded the latest drivers from the Hawking website. After I installed the software, it seemed to work quite well.

I am getting solid 54Mbps connections and web surfing feels like you have a wired connection. I have a profile setup in the software that came with the adapter and I am not using XP's zero configuration network software to manage the connection settings. I would also recommend getting a short USB extension cable so that you have better access to the other USB ports. This will also allow you to place the adapter in a better location for the best reception.