D-Link Wireless N USB Adapter DWA-130 (network adapter)

It was really worth the money. I bought one and was told by the salesman "we've had them returned because they don't work with vista". I had it working in vista within ten minutes. Latest drivers support everything EXCEPT windows 64. This sucks because i dual boot x64. I also was disappointed to see there weren't any osx drivers available since i have a dual-boot on a dell with osx. Other than that it works flawlessly with vista and xp both, although there's a problem with the factory software you are given. You are given the option to skip install of the dlink software and use windows zero wireless config, but it installs it anyway and it can prevent windows from auto-connecting to your wireless network.

Updated on Mar 30, 2009

as a follow-up, i would like to point out another flaw that makes the thing pretty much unusable with a media center system. If you go into standby the adapter will never come back out of standby. You have to reboot to get internet to work again. Even unplugging it and plugging it into a different port is the same. I did find a fix. You have to go into hardware properties and lower the speed of the usb port it is plugged into. This will cap your internet to about 4mb/sec. It's a software issue but they haven't released a driver update since i've owned it, and they haven't released any firmware updates either even though you are supposed to be able to update it when wireless n is finalized.

Updated on Oct 27, 2009

as an update, drivers crash in standby mode if you have them plugged into a 2.0 usb slot. It won't wake from standby. 1.1 doesn't do this. As well, there is no firmware update even though wireless n has been finalized.