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Belkin F5D6050 Wireless USB Network Adapter

Belkin F5D6050 Wireless USB Network Adapter

List Price: $59.99
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Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: good Airport Card Replacement M7600LL
Review: Since Apple stopped manufacturing the original airport card, they are way overpriced on eBay. You can't use Airport Extreme for the G3 iBooks, either. This is one of the few wireless adapters that has Mac OS X drivers.

Obviously, not as aesthetically pleasing as an airport card or even a smaller keychain-sized USB adapter, but hey it works for $25. I'm on Mac OS X 10.2.8 with a Netgear router. I had a bit of trouble getting it to connect to the internet, but with a bit of trial and error got it to work by changing my router settings to "open system" auth and "allow SSID broadcast".

Downside is that since the iBook is USB 1.0, traffic thru this device is rather slow--much slower than the theoretical 11MBPS that 802.11b supports

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Disappointing
Review: The device randomly disconnects itself from the WAP. It may randomly come back again, but no guarantee. The new drivers from Belkin's web site have not solved the problem. Unreliable. Go for another product.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Unreliable
Review: This piece of equipment has worked very poorly for us. It works seamlessly for days and even weeks and then suddenly will not work at all. There is no change in the environment that we are aware of, yet a good signal one day is just an impossible signal the next. It begins working again sometimes when we unplug and replug it, sometimes when we relocate the receiver, etc. It is the computer equivalent of hanging aluminum foil off your TV antennae. My husband is a computer professional but this does not have any user accessible parts so when it doesn't want to work, we are just at it's mercy. I wish we hadn't bought it.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Even worked well on a junky old computer....
Review: This thing was truly a snap. Even on an old bargain-basement cheapie 366-PII that I bought for a toy, with a flakey DVD-ROM drive, it installed with PNP and was talking to my Belkin wireless router and had me surfing into my usual websites in a couple of minutes!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Great little adapter
Review: We have a 3-computer wireless network set up (all belkin) and I gotta say.. it kicks. The wireless router is on the main floor connected to my cable modem and the 3 computers are one level up. Even still, I get a great connection 95 percent of the time. The only downside is that about once a day, I get disconnected and need to reset the router. I'm not sure of the exact cause (whether I should blame the adapter or the router itself). Overall, the pros definitely outweigh the cons This wireless adapter is a great addition to the network and i'll never accept anything else!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: works through my condo floors
Review: Wireless depends so much on environment, but here in the burbs, in a nice old brick co-op, I have this device sharing my upstairs neighbor's broadband connection, via her Linksys wireless router. Signal strength is showing pretty low, but even fixing the TxRate at 11Mbps works beautifully, with no lost frames. There's an auto setting to optimize the TxRate in the event of an unreliable signal, and 11Mbps is way more than broadband needs, AFAIK.

The installation under Win98 was accomplished seamlessly, truly PNP; it hopped right on the network and got all the info it needed from DHCP. Which reminds me, always restrict access to (and encrypt) your wireless network, unless you want to give free bandwidth to any chucklehead in a 200 ft radius. This chucklehead helps his neighbor with her computer pretty often and I plan on proposing that I continue to do so free of charge and/or share the costs. Power to the people!


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