Prolink DH-5102U USB Wireless Adapter - My Experience

First off, this is not a sponsored post nor was I paid by anyone. And second, I am not a expert in USB wireless adapters for PCs. All I am doing here is to share my knowledge and experience in using this USB wireless adapter from Prolink model DH-5102U (Note: This is a Lazada Malaysia affiliate link). The only reason why I bought this adapter is because it was being offered at a special price at my time of purchase in July 2023. More importantly, it supports the Linux operating system. So far, I have used it on Windows XP, Windows 7, LUbuntu 18.04 and Linux Mint 21.2 XFce. On the whole, I find this device to be usable. Unfortunately, it has its limitations too.

Negatives

First, the bad news.

It works on Windows XP alright with the supplied drivers on a mini CDROM. Drivers are also down-loadable online. However, the installed drivers did interfere with my USB flash drive operations. Sometimes I can't even transfer files either into or off my flash drive - totally unusable. The worse part, uninstalling the drivers does not remove the offending programs - runSW.exe and SwUSB.exe. What I did in the end was to delete those 2 offending files in the folder "C:\Windows". File transfer operations on my USB flash drive returned to normal after that.

Now, how do I removed that RunSWUSB service that the install file have inserted into my Windows XP system? Luckily I have a system backup. I will restore from my backup one day.

Positives

Now the good new.

It works beautifully on Windows 7. There were no built-in drivers in Windows 7. So I installed the drivers from the included mini CDROM.

First test: will it interfere with my file transfer operations with a USB flash drive like on my Windows XP system, I wonder? After having used it for 2 weeks, the answer, so far, is no. In fact, this USB wifi adapter works quite well.

The Linux drivers, which I downloaded off their website, works on LUbuntu 18.04. Installation is just a matter of typing on the command line "sudo make" and "sudo make install", followed by a reboot. Login into LUbuntu and the wifi signal will be detected in no time. Good!.

A couple of weeks later, I tried doing the same after my Linux upgrade from LUbuntu to Mint. Bad news here. "sudo make" choked and failed halfway while compiling. But this driver that I downloaded off github works. Installation is also like what I described in the last paragraph above ie. "sudo make", "sudo make install" followed by a reboot.

There are numerous other Linux drivers out there but I never tried them.

Note: Prolink DH-5102U is a dual-band wireless adapter. However, I am unsure as to which band I am connected to while on Linux and neither did I try to find out. All that I know is, it works. And that's what matters.