UGREENWifi Dongle, AX900 USB WiFi 6 Adapter Wireless Dual Band 5GHz/2.4GHz Network for Desktop Laptop, Supports Windows 10/11 Built-in Driver

Price when reviewed: £ 13.99.I am a fan of Ugreen products. I have owned many of them and always found them to be very well made, quality products.I ordered this Wi-Fi6 dongle as a backup for my Windows 11 laptop computer as I recently had problems with the built-in Wi-Fi6 card which I had to replace.When first plugging this dongle into a USB type A port on my laptop it registered as a drive in Windows Explorer. Opening the drive revealed setup.exe file which I ran to install the drivers. The dongle then showed up in Network Connections and I was able to select Wi-Fi network and enter the password.I use my laptop in a different room from the router so will never get the full Wi-Fi speed. A speed test on this Ugreen dongle averaged at 250Mbps while the built-in card ran at an average of 360Mbps. I also speed tested a Wi-Fi5 dongle I have in the same USB-A port on the laptop and it averaged 138Mbps and was quite hot after just a few minutes use while the Ugreen dongle was only warm.The built-in Wi-Fi card does have a pair of aerials which this dongle doesn’t which is possibly the reason for the drop in speed. But this dongle shows a clear increase in speed over a modern AC1300 Wi-Fi5 dongle.Ultimately, the speed you get depends on many factors, internet speed, router location, aerials etc. This is another quality product from Ugreen and I am happy to recommend it.

This is exactly what you'd expect; it's a compact WiFi 6 adapter that allows you to add wireless capabilities to devices that don't have them. The actual strength of the signal and reliability of the connection seems a lot better than some of the other more compact dongles I've used, and is surprisingly comparable to some of the ones I have with actual antennae. So overall pretty impressed with this overall.Main caveat being, if you have more than half gig internet, this might underperform some others. Being only USB-2 does cap this device's speed quite a bit for me, but also for most people this cap on speed is probably not even close to being hit. So honestly for 99% of people this is more than good enough, and even then I don't personally do anything that requires a single device to have such high speeds either.

Now I'd be the first to highly rate a Ugreen product, as I've had numerous items from them recently. They make good keyboards/cables and the like. However, their dongle-type products seem a bit rubbish.This device when plugged-in crashes my PC entirely (winexplorer) until unplugged - I think this exclusively relates to the onboard storage that includes the driver package. Curiously I see no hardware device other than this, once plugged-in...As this storage device contains an .exe I did originally wonder if my Antivirus was proactively blocking the autorun (as suspicious devices can sometimes execute programs from pen-drives or other dongles masquerading as such). However, disabling this yielded no results. So either windows itself is blocking, the hardware is dodgy, or I'm missing something very simple here. I must add that the storage aspect concerns me, as I never like seeing room for suspect packages to be included on otherwise simple hardware devices. Well built and packaged, but no use to me if it doesn't instantly work!I might add, that I also tried this on my Win10 office machine to the same bizarre activity.

The Wi-Fi dongle didn’t work by default out of the box on either my Windows 11 laptops I tried it on, as it needs the drivers which are included on the dongle. There are so many similar devices on the market that do just work when plugged in by default with Windows. At least the drivers are signed by a verified publisher in this instance. I took a chance on one of my less important Windows 11 laptops, installed the drivers fine, and it worked, without needing a reboot even. Speeds were similar to other USB Wi-Fi dongles I have used, and the connection while using it was stable.However, this dongle would not be able to work on my laptop, as external drive connectivity is disabled due to company policy. If using Wi-Fi adaptors that don’t require drivers installed off them, they will work by default with device drivers supplied by Windows. I would need to apply for special permissions and approvals in order to use it, and it most likely would be rejected due to risks involved.The concern with preloaded software on devices, in that if there is a vulnerability found in the supplied software or drivers later, that are then at risk of being exploited later at some point, will that software automatically be updated with newer fixed software after the driver supplied by the company has patched it? Where can you go to make sure the current drivers are the latest and are risk-free, as it is unlikely this will be automatic within Windows updates if it wasn't already included.If you don't mind this, there is software supplied on the device which will show up as another drive on your system, so you don’t need to download anything.

I have an older laptop with an older WIFI standard and wanted to get it upto date and in the times.I have a WIFI 6 enabled router and several of my devices are already compatible, it was just my dated laptop that didnt have it.Its almost PnP, when plugged in for the first time it pops up on the explorer as a storage device, when you open that it has the drivers needed for installation onto the pc - I have windows 11 and it installed with no issues.The intallation was simple and the device up and running withing a matter of minutes.I have noticed an improvement in speed. I have gigabit internet and was always getting less than 100mb/s on this laptop.After the installation and a restart, the speed test reads at well over 400mb/s which is nowhere near the gigabit speeds but 4x better than what it was before so I cannot complain.