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I was afraid I would have poor performance going wireless but have been pleasantly surprised by this wireless adaptor.Not a gamer so fast downloads are not necessarily a requirement for me. Is it the antenna. I have been using this little device for over six months. I am almost as far away from the router as I can be in a 4000 square foot plus house. I'd recommend this device highly. However, speed is pretty good. Laptop reception in the Hawking's location is spotty at best, but the signal from the Hawking unit is strong.
I haven't had to move the antenna at all to improve signal strength.I am not a highly technical person. I'm in a rental house, which is inadequately hard-wired for a network. I don't know. Reception has been good to great. Using a Belkin pre-N wireless router which has been in the family for a number of years. Better than some perhaps but no techie. It was easy to install, so I was up and running very quickly, and it has met my needs and out-perfomed my expectations.
Maybe with a more powerful antenna I would have seen an improvement. but it didn't help at all.
Sadly, the adapter's range was less than the range of my laptop's built-in wireless functionality. I read the reviews and thought that maybe my laptop had a compromised range already and this would help, heck.
I bought the Hawking HWUG1 Wireless G USB adapter hoping I could extend the range of my laptop. I even attached an USB extension cord to the adapter to try and move the adapter around (higher, lower, closer to a window, etc).
it has an antenna on it. How could it be any worse than what I already have built-in.
Every location I tried (at home, friends house and work) failed to match the signal strength of my laptop.Setup was easy and the included software worked fine. On its own; however, it's not worth it.
I have a MacBook that has good WiFi and I have no complaint but I wanted a boost to get this tough signal. He even gave me the one that gave me the best results.wasn't doing him much goodI went to Kauai and the place I was staying had WIFI with a weaker signal. A co-worker had all sorts of USB wifi antennas that he had been testing at home with little to no results and let me try some of them. with the most Db. I was able to pick up a number of other wifi's in the area that I hadn't seen before with mixed strength (with my Mac or PC). All were WEP, WAP'ed and WOOP'ed looking for MAC daddies so I couldn't test them out for speed.At my tough location at work I saw an improvement but not much. So I'm looking for an Improvement in signal for a tough location at work surrounded with steel. All claim to be the best.
It is nice to be able to screw in other antennas.all-n-all not much reason to buy it. The MacBook did better than the HWUG1.I put the HWUG back in the bag for the rest of the stay.I spent a lot of time reading up on the different ones. Good luck. The end result is none of his antennas gave me much of a boost although they were bigger and I could aim them where as the HWUG1 was limited. I installed the software at home with no issue and it worked fine. Good luckWould I buy it again.probably not.
The cool part of the HWUG1 is I could just screw the cable in to the USB module. He told me that he had shopped around and had poor luck with getting much boost any of the ones he had bought (4). The software does let you see the signal strength which Mac does not. If you find somthing better let me know
It works great.I purchased the adapter because my HP laptop, on board, wireless stopped working. The Hawking was easy to setup and worked right out of the box.The only complaint I have it that is is rather bulky when attached to the side of my laptop. I have to be careful not to accidentally pop or break it off if I'm moving the laptop around.
I asked tech support for the file name of the missing driver and they didn't answer me but instead asked me if I tried loading it on another pc. It gets pretty warm to the touch. BTW, Configurating the setting of the protocol isn't mentioned in the quick start guide and the device won't work if not properly configured. And then after loading the driver separately loading the utility. I was loading onto an XP platform.
The only way (after hours of trying, emailing and calling) was to load the driver by itself. My memory sticks, printer, and camera card reader don't get warm and they work on any port. The quick start documentation was weak, doesn't exactly match the software and if you follow it you probably won't be able to get it to load or to operate. I then asked them if the file was AegisP.sys or rt73.sys and they responded by NOT answering my question but instead asking me if I also had a problem loading on Vista.
Make sure to read the manual that comes on the CD. Maybe my pc wasn't designed to handle such high amounts of current draw. I still ended up with a missing driver warning but I was able to get past it (eventually) but with essentially no help from their tech support. Perhaps I am overly impatient in expecting a straight answer to a straight forward question. So it works a little bit better than the built-in antenna in the laptop.I had to return the first G adapter.
I was disappointed with the Hawking G adapter. If I recall correctly, I don't believe that the software from their website includes the manual. Read the manual.I'm on a laptop and the adapter draws quite a bit of power. It draws enough power that it doesn't work on every one of the USB ports. Perhaps I should have sympathy for them - - maybe they don't know what the driver name is or know their own product very well (but that's just my own opinion). The USB plug was intermittent. I found that if I followed the doc to load the driver and utility together that the driver was missing a critical file.
Bottom line: If you are willing to buy a product with bad documentation, poor/ineffective tech support (you're basically on your own), with software that is a bit quirky, and with hardware that draws a bit of power in order to get a few dB of improvement then this is the product for you. I detected a bit of "attitude" in their responses. I eventually (and by myself) found the rt73.sys file had been installed in an obscure location on the hard disk and their software didn't know where to find it. I think that the half-wave dipole antenna gives a few dB of gain.
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