Perfect

Involvement:Expert (understands the inner workings) - Ownership:1 week to 1 month

- Nice design. Discrete, small and don't look bad on your laptop.
- Really good speeds. I got 7.5 mb/s (megabytes per second) over a SMB ("Windows") network connected on my home server (which is my old computer) via USB 2.0. This is almost the limit of my entire network (the router isn't very fast).
- Works perfect on linux. Took 5min to configure it. [9710:7830 MosChip Semiconductor MCS7830]
- Works perfect on Windows 7 x64. Took a few minutes to Windows get the drivers from Windows Update. After that, all fun and joy.

I think there's no cons at all. Maybe the red LED, but I really don't care. If the LED gets annoying I can just remove it from the board!
It may get just a little hot eventually... just ignore.

The first think I thought when I saw this device was "omg this should be damn slow!". It is NOT slow. It's fast enough for almost any application. I can even watch a 1080p movie from network!!

Buy it. You don't need it? Buy it anyway! Somedays I want to do some little experiments on computer networks. This device really helps. It's like having a laptop with 2, 3 or even more network cards.