Review on OURLINK 600Mbps Mini Dual Band Wireless Network Adapter 🔌 with 5dBi Antenna - Win Vista/7/8.1/10, Mac OS X 10.9-10.15 Compatible by Jeremy Hong

Nice little adapter. I bought this to improve download speeds on a huge Toshiba Windows 7 laptop and it took the laptop from 17 Mbps to 25. Nice jump, but not as much as I was hoping. Other laptops in the same room (same 2Wire hotspot, same 18m distance, same 3-4 walls) have 20Mbps throughput, Toshiba peaks at 17-19Mbps with built-in Wi-Fi 802.11N, and after a few days without rebooting, it slows down gradually to the range of 5-6 Mbps (probably a leaking packet buffer in the driver). The easiest way to get rid of the driver is to change the hardware, so I bought that. By the way, my fiber has a maximum uplink speed of 40Mbps, which I can achieve by using 100Mbps Ethernet instead of WiFi. The device installed without any problems from Ourlink website, the only problem is that it downloads some Cisco malware (EAP, FAST). that I'm pretty sure I don't want to and won't delete. It is based on the Realtek chipset and comes with a nice Realtek hardware manager. First I connected Ourlink to an 802.11N access point and using speedof.me I measured the download speed as 21Mbps - slightly faster due to the 5dB antenna which works well. Then I connected an 802.11ac access point to it and got a speed of 25 Mbps. All speeds are fairly stable across multiple tests. So there is nothing to complain about here. it does its job at 25 Mbs. I'll try this on some other laptops, some Linux, and update the review if I see a significant difference. Update: Downgrading my rating after porting the driver to a Windows 8.1 system. Installing from the web failed, so I tried the CD that came with it. It didn't work at first, but left an unkillable process running in the background of my computer. I tried restarting my computer and reinstalling. It worked this time (despite some incorrect information in the instructions on the PDF CD), but there was more malware left on my machine. I also have an unsettling feeling that I should scan my computer for malware and rootkits. NASTY 2nd Installation Experience - I will not buy from OURLINK again.