I have never used one of these mini wi-fi adapters but strictly from an antenna point of view, I don't think it would work as well for areas with weaker wi-fi signals as a full size USB or the wi-fi antenna in most notebook computers, as they would have better antennas. Bigger antenna= more signal in most cases. I am sure its not very expensive so why not just give it a try and see if it meets your needs.
I have something similar to this for my desktop and it ...works. Never been able to get more than 65mbits out of it, latency is a bit high and it would drop out once in a while, I eventually bought a PCI-E x1 802.11n adapter as I needed more than 65mbits of bandwidth.
