WiFi USB dongle with no need to install a driver in Win10

Question

I am looking for a WiFi USB dongle or WiFi+Bluetooth USB dongle with the following requirements:

Must-haves:

1. Must install under Windows 10 without requiring external drivers to be loaded from either manufacturer website or Windows Update (basically appropriate driver must ship with Windows 10 out of the box).
2. Must not circumvent requirement 1 by posing as a USB mass storage device with driver installation program on it.
3. Must plug into USB-A port, not USB-C

Nice-haves

1. Support of as recent WiFi standard as possible
2. Support of as high WiFi speed as possible
3. Support of as high USB speed as possible
4. Made by a reputable manufacturer
5. Preferably as small size as possible, but this is negotiable
6. If must-have requirements can only be met by giving up on Bluetooth, this is workable too

The best I could get so far by searching on Amazon for "driverless USB WiFi adapter" was a bunch of devices that pose as a USB mass storage and offer you to install the drivers from it (here is one example), which violates must-have requirement 2.

The second-best I could find is a product that has drivers built-in into Windows 11, but not Windows 10.

Maybe anyone had the same problem and found the product that solves it?

Answer 1

OK, since nobody has responded, I have just bought an (almost random) USB dongle to give it a try and it worked.

TLDR: TP-Link Archer T3U Nano (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09KTDXPY3)

(Full disclosure: I am NOT an Amazon affiliate and I do not benefit from sales of this product in any way)

Two things were very frustrating in the process of search and selection:

1. None of the vendors/manufacturers are explicitly stating that their products will work with Windows 10 out of the box without needing to install additional drivers (some do make such statement for Windows 11).
2. There is no authoritative list of devices that Windows 10 has drivers for out of the box without needing to contact Windows Update (would be nice if Microsoft maintained such list, but when was the last time they have listened to their customers?)

Anyway, I just bought a product that was coming from a well-established manufacturer (although not from the free world). The product description was as ambiguous as all other product descriptions, and it also ships with a CD, which hints that driver installation would be needed, but to my amazement, it just picked up a stock driver that ships with Windows 10 and worked without asking for any driver installation on a machine that was not connected to the network (so it is not possible that the driver was quietly picked up from Windows Update).

Answer 2

I have an older PC with a wifi card in it, but was only getting 12 Mbps from my cellphones hotspot (using ipFail Continuous Speed Test to do my testing of best location for phone and aiming of wifi aerials).

So was wondering what would happen if I plugged in a USB wifi adapter as well, to my surprise I now sometimes get 40mbps depending if cellphone is getting that much (ranges between 18 - 72 velcroed to a window in best spot I've found, in my poor reception location, depending on weather and day or night time).

Unplugging it, the PC drops back to 12 Mbps again- but signal was almost nothing at first, but turning wifi off and back on again, brought it back to 12, so unsure if PC is using both at same time or not, (but moving wifi card's aerials did still seem to alter signal strength).

It's just an unnamed cheap chinese USB 2.0 wifi stick I had lying about (just called ac600m dual band), which came with a driver disk, which I did not use. Windows 10 seems to have recognized it just fine, but there may well be some that it does not.