Need a Wireless Adapter? Call for a Panda

Panda 300Mbps Wireless-N USB Adapter

All good things - mediocre things, too - must come to an end, and that’s what happened to the old Belkin wireless adapter we’d had for five or six years. The house isn’t wired for Ethernet, and there I was, sitting at a bad-ass desktop machine: superfast (500-GB solid-state drive) and with memory out the wazoo, but no onboard wireless card. No problem: just buy a replacement…

I ended up with a Panda Adapter, which came from some little company in China (they all do – I looked). I wanted fast, and this is about what you get at a price point of around fifteen bucks. The listing at Amazon had a dozen different compatibilities listed, and the one I needed – Windows 7 – was in there. So I bit.

The little clamshell package showed up two days later (Thanks, Amazon Prime!). It included the wireless adapter, a printed user’s manual (about 4-point type) and a mini CD-ROM with the installer.

Specifications and Compatibilities

First, this thing is tiny; about the size of an ordinary thumb drive (and therefore, about the size of an ordinary thumb). I installed mine on Windows 7 Premium 64-bit. It’s said to be plug-and-play on Windows 8 and the most recent Mac OS. Other specs are:

• Compatible with Windows operating systems back to XP (32- and 64-bit), Mac OS back to X, and a host of Unix flavors. 
• 802.11n compliant, and backwards-compatible to any 2.4 GHz router running on 802.11 g 
• Maximum speed rating of 300 mbps
• Supports WEP 64/128-bit, WPA, WPA2

Installation This took maybe fifteen minutes, most of which was translating the users manual from Chinglish to English. There are no instructions for Win 7 except for a note to use the instructions for XP; that worked fine. Setup was no different from any other wireless connection. A few people at Amazon say to only install the windows driver and not the utility, but installing both works just fine for me (the desktop is a Dell Precision 3610 workstation). Connection Quality The desktop sits at the far end of the house from the router, and the old Belkin rarely got more than 2-3 bars of 5 on signal strength. The Panda routinely gets 5 bars, even in the same spot. I like this – a lot.

I have the adapter plugged into a USB extension cable so I can get it higher in the room; this did not come with the adapter (I cannibalized it from the Belkin). Otherwise, I’d have it plugged into a USB port on the CPU.

Overall

I’m quite satisfied. Five stars!