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This was an arseache to find, so I'm backing it up here.

It should work with any RTL8192EU-based USB WLAN, and trust me... there's a ridiculous amount of these still being produced. Note that RTL8192E and RTL8192CU aren't the same thing, I don't know the technical differences.

Dunno if automatic detection will work in devmgmt.msc, I used the 'have disc' method personally with a rather common variant, a TP-LINK TL-WN823N v2 card. TP-LINK official site states their driver supports Vista (both x64/x86) but actually omits the Vista ones specifically, while XP x64's is included, interestingly. Yeah...

Anyway, the download is attached. The driver itself is dated late 2014, and states it was only intended for 'WHQL testing' and was never actually meant to be released to any of the redistributors of this chipset, but made its way around anyway presumably through some redistributor. It was an absolute pain to find either way (uniquely, the INF has _Vista in its name, which doesn't seem to be present on the 'officially released' drivers).

And you thought getting this junk to work on Linux was bad... at least the drivers are easy to find for it lol.

I think I can see why this never made it past WHQL testing stages - it's horrendously unstable.

Using the same card as you (albeit a V3, but it has an identical chipset) on both XP x64 and Vista x64 - works pretty well on XP, but on Vista it seems to only run on 802.11b mode without too much problems, and even then it's still rather unstable: unable to hold connections properly, etc. while it works completely fine on XP.

It's still relatively strange that Realtek - a company rather well known for supporting obsolete OS long after EOL - made the decision to cut back on Vista support before XP. Presumably a lack of physical hardware resources, much like why most software vendors dropped it alongside XP (and why XP x64 never gained much widespread traction at all).

Plokzig wrote: *

05 Mar 2021, 08:54

I think I can see why this never made it past WHQL testing stages - it's horrendously unstable.

Using the same card as you (albeit a V3, but it has an identical chipset) on both XP x64 and Vista x64 - works pretty well on XP, but on Vista it seems to only run on 802.11b mode without too much problems, and even then it's still rather unstable: unable to hold connections properly, etc. while it works completely fine on XP.

It's still relatively strange that Realtek - a company rather well known for supporting obsolete OS long after EOL - made the decision to cut back on Vista support before XP. Presumably a lack of physical hardware resources, much like why most software vendors dropped it alongside XP (and why XP x64 never gained much widespread traction at all).

Try the XP x64 driver on Vista.

Plokzig wrote: *

05 Mar 2021, 08:54

I think I can see why this never made it past WHQL testing stages - it's horrendously unstable.

Using the same card as you (albeit a V3, but it has an identical chipset) on both XP x64 and Vista x64 - works pretty well on XP, but on Vista it seems to only run on 802.11b mode without too much problems, and even then it's still rather unstable: unable to hold connections properly, etc. while it works completely fine on XP.

It's still relatively strange that Realtek - a company rather well known for supporting obsolete OS long after EOL - made the decision to cut back on Vista support before XP. Presumably a lack of physical hardware resources, much like why most software vendors dropped it alongside XP (and why XP x64 never gained much widespread traction at all).

That is weird. I have a Dell Inspiron 3847 that has a Realtek Ethernet card that has support for OSes as old as 2000. This allowed me to get Ethernet to work with Vista, even though it is unsupported on Haswell. 2000 should work too, but with no graphics driver for that either, it would be a moot point.