Trying to install my N300 WiFi USB adapter, (Netgear prefers that you search for it by its full model number, which is WNA3100 as shown on the sticker on the bottom box that otherwise says N300 all over it). The box comes with an antique style installation CD or a wired network connection, but my system doesn't have a CD drive so I was hoping to just download the driver from Netgear onto a thumb drive and install it that way. Which I did, but after installation the driver just couldn't recognize the adapter at the point in the installation where it says to plug it in. This is despite the adapter clearly showing up in device manager. This left me with the possibility that the problem installing the driver was either the driver or my system. I was about to experiment with trying to install the earlier versions of the driver, which Netgear also has on their site, when somebody loaned me a USB CD drive, so I tried using the installation CD and of course it worked fine. So the driver from Netgear's site is broken somehow but now I have my adapter up and running.
Here is Netgear's support page for this adapter, as near as I can tell. It says both WNA3100 and N300, but it could still have been the wrong page. It is suspicious that the photo of the adapter on this page doesn't look anything like the one that I was sold, so this must be the wrong driver somehow. https://www.netgear.com/support/product/WNA3100.aspx?cid=wmt_netgear_organic
I tried the steps shown on this page, which sort of boil down to trying to uninstall whatever old driver might already be present before trying to install the new driver. https://kb.netgear.com/20025/Unable-to-install-USB-wireless-adapter?cid=wmt_netgear_organic
