I haven’t tried any other wireless adapters except for the official Microsoft one. The receiving on it is really good (don’t know about 3 houses down) and I was able to get full signal from across the house. I’m pretty sure the official one is as good as most on board wireless cards that laptops have. So if you are able to pick it up on a laptop you should have a problem with the adapter. As far as going off brand if you can get the same thing do it because the Microsoft adapter is like $100 or it was when I bought it.
I really haven’t heard anything at all about non-official ones though. I do know that Microsoft likes you to use their products so they might try and hinder the effectiveness of other products. But that’s up to you what you wanna do.