Then... nothing.
The red LED blinked twice as fast now — faster, angrier. For three evenings, Alex scoured the internet. Reddit threads from 2015. Tom’s Hardware posts from 2017. A single YouTube comment from 2019: "For Win10, use the Ralink RT2870 driver."
The progress bar moved. Green checkmarks appeared.
"No problem," Alex thought. "I’ll just download the driver from Tenda’s website."
Still nothing. Device Manager now showed the adapter as "Tenda W322E" but with a different error: "This device cannot start. (Code 10)."