Generic uno boards reliability

Hi all

I bought a dozen of these for me and my kids to play with.

UNO R3 2012 Development Board MEGA328P ATMEGA16U2 With USB Cable For Arduino

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/221802708989?_trksid=p2057872.m2749.l2649&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT

Are they reliable. Kids are having a great time with switches and LED's. Me on the other hand am having a nightmare with simple wireless comms using NRF24L01+. It took me 3 days to get 1 of probably 10 examples up and running. when I went back to my untouched project and experimented with distances, no code or hardware changes othe than hookingn the uno up to other compters, I get different results. My head hurts too much to diagnose the reasons if there are reliablility issues with cheap gineric (non arduino) uno board.

Thanks all.

wow.... all the brain ache, wasted time checking, checking blaming myself, must be doing something wrong... example after example and it was a dodgey nrf24L01+. swapped it over and everythingn works fine. grrr