DWL G122/132 USB Adapters

On the basis of a post in MS Answers..

http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7hardware/thread/8856ddb5-ff72-4f32-9e6d-5d94e6aa5182

. I decided to try out my D-Link G132 on my 64-bit Windows 7 desktop. Surprisingly, it installed and was working within a couple of minutes.

Why surprising? Well, it was discontinued in 2007 and there were never any 64-bit drivers officially released for it. The last drivers ever released were for XP and Vista 32-bit only during January 2008. The G122 was also discontinued in 2007, but drivers were released for Vista 64bit during September of 2009.

I am fairly sure that the G132 was dumped early because Vista did not see it as having 108 mbps throughput, which was the only thing that the 132 had over the 122. Needless to say that, even though the G132 is working on my computer, it still only shows as a 54 mbps device.

Issues regarding the use of the DWL G122 in the post above have yet to be resolved. I can’t try out a G122 because I don’t have one, but one thing is for sure, the D-Link website is not very reliable when it comes to deciding what hardware device will work with which OS.

Other hardware manufacturers..

It was found that some Dell printers which had been accredited as not being Windows 7 compatible when installed via Vista drivers by Dell would actually work ok. I don’t doubt that other manufacturers were as cagey as Dell and D-Link appear to have been.

I understand the need of hardware manufacturers to encourage new sales but some users, on the advice of people like me , have had to stretch tight budgets and buy new stuff when they clearly didn’t need to do so.

I would like to apologise to all in the above category for any misinformation that I have passed on. In my defence, I have to say that I have to get my information from manufacturer websites unless I have specific experience with a piece of hardware.

From now on, I will suggest that anybody wanting to install Windows 7 should maybe take a chance on there being hardware drivers for peripheral devices.

When buying anything new, I will remember the manufacturer names that gave less than complete compatibility information re their product lines, and will not buy from the list until I see some improvement from them.