Leaderboard

To piggy back on wade's suggestion. You can also install linux or BSD to a USB so you dont need to truly dual boot if you have concerns. Just buy a large enough USB to comfortably fit an installed linux distro on it and space for whatever files and programs you need. You can also do the same with SD cards, but motherboard can be finnicky about this. If you go the living on a USB, just be aware, you will probably have slower I/O between the CPU and USB stick. Unless maybe you have an older conventional HDD with a slow speed in your machine. But if your hard drive in your machine is an SSD or NVME, expect the USB stick to respond a little slower. Also depending on which version of USB you have.

I am not familiar with the chipset but a quick search does show that the wifi adapter supports dual band. If you can only see 2.4ghz, naturally you will be able to see less if some potential access points decided (for any reason) to disable the 2.4ghz band. Before running airodump, be sure to verify that you are in monitor mode. There are also some options for seeing if there are any problems with your setup that prevents your card from entering monitor mode. You'll want to use airmon-ng <check|check kill> for this check and refer to the documentation for more information. airmon-ng start <interface> airmon-ng check kill airodump-ng <options> <monitor-interface> Also, what does your output look like when you start in monitoring mode? If you are concerned with a dual boot because of malware, there are ways you can jail or isolate your environments or malware. Look into sandboxing, for example. If you want to quickly test the hypothesis that it might be a VM configuration issue, do a live boot. Throw Kali on a usb drive, and boot directly from the usb drive. You'll be prompted to do a Live Boot or Install kali. Do a Live Boot. It won't impact your main operation system.