Netis Wireless N 300Mbps Long-Range USB Adapter with Two 5dBi Antennas and USB 2.0 Cradle (WF-2116), 300 Mbps High Gain

I moved to an older historic building (circa 1853) with very thick brick/masonry/lath and plaster interior walls. The building has a "whole building" WiFi setup with routers on the first and 4th floors. My condo is on the second floor, immediately up the stairs from the first floor router and with pretty good line of sight placement for the WiFi signals. In fact in the front portion of my unit the signal is great. Unfortunately, I work from home and my office is in the rear of my unit - farthest from the router. As a result, I was getting very weak signals on both my Mac desktop and my work Windows laptop. I had an extender/adapter put in my front living room to boost the signal, but it didn't completely solve the problem. So after doing some research I tried one of these for my Mac (it plugs directly into the computer), did the setup (pretty straightforward) and was very pleased with the results. My reception and signal strength is now "very good" - not excellent, but certainly good enough to make it painless to use my Mac. It worked so well that I bought one for my work (Windows) computer as well. However, the installation software comes on a CD and my Windows laptop doesn't have a CD/DVD player!! So, after some head scratching, I put the CD in my Mac, copied the installation software to a USB drive, and put the USB drive into my laptop, and voila! it worked.Overall very satisfied, and the price was great and they even look nice.

I would give this 5 stars, but it was a little tricky setting up for 8.1. The product is great after you get it installed right. I went from 2 bars to 4 bars on the chart thing. For the record my internet connection is in my moms house across the road in the living room, so the signal is going threw 3 walls, 50 across the road and another wall in house.now for the install. first go to the web page and down load the 8.1 drivers. leave them zipped for now. Now insert the disk and install the drivers for the right product. It might tell you to connect the device, do so. Then go to the downloaded zip files and extract them all. After you extract them you have to go to the folder you extracted and open it. Go to the setup exe and click on it and install. Your comp will have to restart after the disk install and after the download install but it will work. Also get rid of the usb base and use a usb extender cable. It took me about 4 hours to figure this install out lol.

Pros: Everything.Cons: Too many pros._________________________No idea what the negative reviews of this product are all about, unless people ordered from shady companies, got a defective unit, or had their own personal ignorance/technical issues that caused them problems with their system and the adapter.Installed driver, plugged it in, working beautifully. The wireless router is about 75' away from me through several floors and walls, I have 100% connection and 100% quality. It's boosted the speed and connectivity to my router, and I went from being about to see 3-6 wireless networks in my area to being able to see, on average, 25 different networks. Many of these are at full and or half speed. There are only about 15 houses within 500-750' of our house, so needless to say, this adapter is picking up some serious distance.Running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, and I know what I'm doing so my system isn't riddled with issues prior to installing this adapter unlike the majority of computer owners these days. The long usb cable and weighted (Yes, it's weighted so it won't tip over) dock is a major plus. The unit is about 5' away from my computer at the moment on a high shelf in the room.100% satisfaction and would recommend to anyone needing that little oomph, or a lot of oomph, to their wifi.

The usb cradle was dead on arrival. The device would turn on when conected directly to the usb port on pc, and would not when connected through cradle. Not considerng it worth to be without internet access while returning it and waiting for the new one I continued to use it without the cradle. However, the usb plug on the device could not support the device weight, so after few months the device failed due to the broken solder connections of the USB connector on the pcb, even if the device had not been disturbed in any way since the initial plugging in.I opened the case and resoldered the USB connector, so the device continued to work for another week. When it failed again I examined the pcb under the magnification and discovered uneccesery extremely small clearences around the USB connector pads, and even one of the four pads spreading reaching over the gap and resting on the surrounding ground plane. The only thing preventing it to make contact with the ground plane was solder mask. That mask probably burned out during my second attemp to resolder connections and the device went beyond repair. It worked good while it worked thou. I cannot recall exactly what I had to do to install the drivers, but I remember that I had to put some small to moderate effort to make them work on Windows 7.

I use this with a Mac Pro, which has poor wifi built in. This antenna definitely boosts my reception. But it disconnects when the computer sleeps and is often very slow about reconnecting. The instructions were not clear, but the manufacturer was responsive, if not much clearer. **Update Jan 2016** With Mac OS El Capitan, my computer stopped waking from sleep, and after some testing, I narrowed it down to this antenna. I contacted tech support about a new driver, and in the meantime, had to remember to unplug the antenna before leaving the computer. Tech support is in China, with very limited English. They didn't have new software at the time, but sent it to me as soon as a beta was available. Had to uninstall the previous version to install the beta. Beta didn't work, and I'm unable to get the old software reinstated and functioning, and tech support just told me to Google it, as they can't Google in China. I now have NO functioning wifi basically and am quite unhappy.