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New Zealand, Wellington
1 Level
703 Review
70 Karma

Review on Enhance Internet Speed with TP-Link AC1200 Wireless Dual Band USB Adapter (Archer T4U V1) by Mike Zeigler

Revainrating 1 out of 5

Great upgrade for an old laptop - Mac OSX compatible with El Capitan

I have this on a MacBookPro5,4 (Mid 2009) with OSX 10.11.6 (El Cap) with the latest drivers from TP Link Installed . available on their website. Installing the driver was easy and worked straight away with no issues. The adapter is plugged into a USB 2.0 port and my network is provided by an Archer C7 v2 router. Internet Speed WRT, when connected directly to the router I get about 105Mbps (slightly more than what I'm actually paying for), via Wi-Fi, when sitting 5ft from the router I get about 85Mbps , if I'm about 75 feet away through some walls, I'm getting about 70 Mbps. Absolute throughput WRT. I copied a 10GB file from my NAS and got stable reads at around 240Mbps, which is about the read speed of my USB 2.0 port (tested with various high-speed flash drives). I suppose you could improve throughput a bit if you had USB 3.0, but it won't do you any good for internet use. This is very good performance for a wireless network, long range performance is much better than my old 802.11n setup. My only gripe with this is that I can't see the adapter's connection speed or wireless network type given the Mac version of the driver software (you can on Windows). The adapter takes a little longer to wake up from sleep mode than the internal wifi card - it should be faster than it is now, but it doesn't matter. Even if you don't upgrade your router to 802.11ac, you'll likely still see an improvement in WiFi speed and range, but it's also worth upgrading your router if you have an internet connection above 50Mbps. Make sure to disable the internal network adapter and any USB power saving settings you may have on your PC or Mac - just google how to do it, it's easy. At the time of publication, this was one of the few (if not the only) inexpensive adapters that were fully compatible with El Capitan.

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