ASUS USB-N53 Detailed Features

So now we have had the grand tour of the USB-N53 adapter itself, it is time now to look at the software side of things. Setup is very simple indeed and there is a small utility to install that will make the most of the USB-N53's features. Once you have it installed you will be greeted with the following screen.

The survey screen is the first you will encounter, from here you can search for and connect to available wireless networks. Once you have connected to a wireless network its details will be highlighted yellow as shown above. Although the configuration utility shows me as connected on the 802.11a band I can assure you it was connected via the 802.11n band. In the next few screens I will talk through the basics of setting up a connection, it is much simpler to use the windows utility but this way you get more options.

Once you have selected the network you would like to connect to and have clicked connect you will get this screen, for the most part you will want to leave these options as they are.

Clicking advance in the previous screen will bring you here, once again unless you know what you are doing it would be best to leave these settings as they are. For the testing part of this review I changed power output from auto to 100% and wireless mode from 2.4GHz + 5GHz to 5GHz.

Next you must select the authentication and data encryption of the chosen network. Since my wireless network is using WPA-2-PSK authentication the data encryption needed to be changed from TKIP to AES in the drop down box, I failed to notice this the first time round and was left wondering why it wasn't connecting.

Once you have set up your connection it is saved in the configuration screen, this allows you to manage multiple connections in one convenient location.

Clicking the Status icon brings you to this screen which has lots of detailed information on your current network connection, much more in depth than the windows 5-bar signal strength system.

Following the status screen is the IP Config screen. There is also a handy Ping utility built in too.

The Ping utility will only take numerical IP addresses (no text addresses like windows command prompt) but it does allow you to set different parameters. To demonstrate I sent a ping request to the IP address of Google.com using the ASUS utility and also using the windows command prompt.

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