IOGear Wireless USB to VGA Adapter Kit

Representing a fairly large school district, we considered buying this product to use with our tablet pc's and mounted projectors. The first product we tried (PC2TV) did not even come close the features and quality of this product. Their solution uses wi-fi (802.11G) standard to connect which is very slow in comparison and interferes with our regular network traffic. When you have a lab with 30+ wireless tablets, you cannot spare the bandwidth for the pc2tv device. The IOGEAR product fixes all that.

Using the new Wireless USB standard (haven't seen another device using this tech yet it's so new) it has 9 times the bandwidth of wi-fi (480Mbps). What's that means, is that it can do really high resolutions and be very smooth. I was playing a standard DVD, at 1680X1080 resolution, and boy is it smooth. It does drop a frame here and there, but compared to the pc2tv device, there simply is no comparison.

Tested on Vista. Once the driver is installed, I can plug in the dongle to any usb port and it automatically connects and extends my desktop. To change to clone mode or resolutions, all you have to do right click an icon near the clock (system tray) and pick it. Changing USB ports does not require a driver reinstallation.

The dongle and the device come pre-associated, so you don't have to worry about the device in the next room interfering. However, if you want to connect to multiple devices, so far the only way is to briefly connect your laptop to the device using the supplied mini usb cable. Hopefully they will have a wireless method to do this in the future.

I ordered this kit after much investigation for a wireless method to link my Dell desktop PC to my Vizio 37" HDTV. I had thoroughly reviewed the specs at the IO Gear website and read many reviews from other suppliers. Upon receiving the unit, I was immediately concerned since the specs on the box state that the 30' wireless range is for a "line of sight" installation and that the range is limited to 15' for High Definition video. My PC is located on the second floor of our home and the TV is on the first floor physically about 25' apart. I should say that the unit was a breeze to hook up, load the software and set up the PC. It worked like a charm for viewing spreadsheets, word documents, surfing the web, etc. just as connected. However, for watching videos, I had to run the USB cable (comes with the kit) through the second floor and connect the small Wireless USB Adapter receiver unit so that is was in the same room as the TV and Wireless VGA Adapter. With this set up it worked just fine for streaming Netflix "Watch Instantly" movies. However, I also wanted to be able to watch network episodes from ABC, NBC, CBS, etc but it failed miserably!! While streaming these shows the sound and video would break up and pause on the PC and no video would be displayed on the HDTV...just a blank screen. I moved the VGA Adapter (and TV) to within 12' of the receiver and still the same result The online help from IO Gear was totally lacking and I sent the unit back.

As others have mentioned, the kit transmits only the video, not the audio from the PC. An audio cable has to be run from PC to TV but I knew that up front.

I have since order a 50' VGA cable with 3.5mm audio from Amazon part numberRiteAV - SVGA Monitor Cable with 3.5mm Audio - 50 ft. and this set up works great!!

This device transmits VGA video ONLY, it is not meant to transmit audio so don't judge it based on that. This is a great way of transmitting video, specifically slide-shows, wirelessly.

We use it for a presentation system in a conference room, the wired VGA out goes to an overhead projector while we use this to drive a secondary LCD display we can move around the room as needed. We've had it work fine with ranges up to 30 feet but keep it at about 20 feet. We use it at 1024x768 resolution, full motion video is touch-and-go but we only need it for display slides and charts/text so it does it's job. The video limitation is due to the maximum transfer speed of the Wireless USB standard so I can't blame the device itself.

It was easy to setup (on Windows XP) with no major issues. It comes with a USB extension cable so you don't have to plug it directly into the PC but you can. If you do plug it into the PC directly it will probably block your other USB ports by virtue of its size.