Anybody get a USB wifi adapter to work?

B

BrandonS23

Bit poster
Trying to get a USB wifi adapter to work on windows 11 ARM in Parallels, so far no luck getting it recognized. I have tried a handful of TP Link Archer adapters (T3U, T2U) and it doesn't seem to matter which driers I install it just shows up in the device manager as a 802.11ac NIC under other device.
 
ASUS USB-BE92 Nano is also not compatible - I was not even able to make it show up in Windows Device Manager, because MacOS was seeing it as DISK and Parallels were erroring out on "another application is using it".

I also have ASUS USB-N53, but due to its age it's missing ARM64 drivers.

Did you have any luck finding something that works?
 
I never did find one that would work, I must have tried 5 different dongles. It was suggested to use a router to connect to the wifi I wanted and then use an ethernet dongle to connect to the router.

I suppose that would work, but too much hassle for what I was wanting. Sure would be a nice feature though.
 
After spending an evening searching for a solution, I think there are 2 problems:
1) MacOS allegedly does not support USB Wireless Adapters (because of Apple). There are some solutions for Intel Macs, but those do not work on Apple Silicon. This could partially explain why the adapter showed up only as a USB Disk.
2) There seem to be no USB Wireless adapters with Windows ARM64 drivers. Those who advertise Plug n Play functionality usually have drivers bundled on an integrated flash drive and looking at multiple USB dongles who provided drivers on their web page, all of them had only x64/x86 drivers - no ARM64.

I think we would need a dongle that does not have the "flash drive" partition with a built-in driver, behaving the same way as the legacy USB dongle I have, but at the same time it would have to provide drivers for Windows ARM64. I have not found any adapter that would meet the criteria.

So in my case I solved it by using a wired connection for my Mac, then binding my integrated Wi-Fi adapter to Parallels VM. A bit cumbersome, but it allows me to stay connected to the Internet while also being connected to an offline Wi-Fi AP which is what I needed.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top