Don't Buy Belkin Electronics

[The Supreme Canuck]

I've been using a Belkin WiFi adapter for my PC for the past few years. Mistake. My connection has been spotty for months, which was irritating, but I wasn't able to isolate the reason. I thought it might just be the crappy router supplied by my ISP. Nope. Turns out it was the adapter. How do I know this? Yesterday, it caught on fire. Not bad, just a little bit of an electrical fire smell, didn't even let any magic smoke out of the thing, but still... enough to yank the thing immediately. You get what you pay for, I suppose.

Just bought a nice Cisco Linksys adapter. Much better connection, much less likely to combust.

Don't buy Belkin.

[Cyborg Girl]

LOL, I figured that out a long time ago. Once had a Belkin wireless router... The wireless part failed wihin about 6 months of the purchase.

[The Supreme Canuck]

I believe it. At least it didn't start burning. Right?

[FZR1KG]

I had a Belkin about 10 years ago. It was one of the first ADSL2 wireless modems around.
The thing was pretty good. Had Cisco stuff that was unreliable.
What it comes down to is who was running the design teams at the time and what chips they used.
Also some places rebadge their low end stuff. IOW, it comes from design houses in China and is manufactured there.

Burning up however is usually either component failure or design.
Design failures get found out on reviews pretty quickly these days.
So check around.

The other thing is now firmware/software can cause problems even when the hardware is rock solid.
It can cause everything from intermittent issues to a burn out.
Most places contract that stuff out so it greatly depends on who you get again for that job.