Review on TP-Link TL-WDN4200 N900 Wireless Dual Band USB Adapter by Carol Fowler

TP-Link TL-WDN4200 is a high-quality dual-band 802.11n USB WiFi adapter that supports speeds up to 450Mbps with 3x3 MIMO. The hardware, design and performance of the WDN4200 are pretty good, but the TP-Link support for 64-bit Windows 8/8.1/10 is just terrible. The 5GHz network WILL NOT WORK when using the built-in Windows driver and the Windows 8 64-bit TP-Link driver will not install as it is not digitally signed. According to TP-Link support, a ridiculous solution is to disable Windows driver signature verification to make your system accept and install unauthenticated and unverified drivers from any source. At the time of writing this article (September 2015), the TP-Link support page still has this old driver (dated no earlier than July 2013). Basically, TP-Link abandoned this product over two years ago, although it is still current and actively shipping, and they cannot help customers to find real solutions. The TP-Link TL-WDN4200 can be made to run on 64-bit Windows 8/8.1/10, but you'll have to take matters into your own hands. TP-Link TL-WDN4200 is powered by MediaTek RT3573 USB WiFi chip and MediaTek Universal Driver (5.1.21.0 dated 02/02/2015) available for download on MediaTek website provides full functionality of this adapter. The MediaTek driver provides support for 5 GHz networks on Windows 8/8.1/10 64-bit and is digitally signed. This particular chip is called the USB RT357X; Download link: http://mediatek.com/en/downloads1/downloads/usb/ Overall, the TP-Link TL-WDN4200 is a good wireless USB adapter that was let down by poor support. I bought this adapter to use with a desktop computer without Wi-Fi, and with a dual-band 802.11n 2x2 MIMO wireless router, I can get a stable connection speed of 243-300Mbps in the 5GHz band reach. The 2.4 GHz connection speed ranges from 72 to 144 Mbit/s. Hardware: 5 stars; Like it a lot! TP-Link support: 1 star; I hate it! Overall: 3 stars; Everything is fine... Notes: 1) After installing MediaTek driver, you can run Windows Update to get the latest driver (5.1.22.1, dated 09/07/2015). I don't know why, but only for the built-in Windows driver (5.1.16.0, as of 06/06/2014) Windows Update did not suggest a newer driver. 2) When I bought this adapter in June 2014, I contacted TP-Link customer service and they ended up sending me a replacement to see if that would help. Since it was a driver issue, the replacement was no better, so I ended up having to buy another wireless adapter to connect to 5GHz networks. I kept this wireless adapter on a shelf for 8 months before finding a possible use for it and I'm glad I kept it because at least there is now a real solution to this drivers nightmare! 3) I've checked the official TP-Link drivers and other than replacing various product and vendor strings with TP-Link, there doesn't seem to be anything out of the ordinary. I find it amazing that given working, signed drivers from the chipset manufacturer, TP-Link still prefers to provide a non-standard driver just because it supports their brand name. 4) I have never tried the TP-Link SoftAP software which allows your device to create a wireless access point when you also have wired internet access. My guess is that the TP-Link application might not work using MediaTek and Inbox drivers, but it can be done manually or with something like Connectify. 5) Attached images; (1) TP-Link driver is NOT signed! (2) Latest Driver via Driver Update via Device Manager