Wireless Netbook Question

This can be a real pain. My other half has an Asus EEEPC which I got her and I have an Acer Laptop and despite my best efforts we often have odd problems with hotel wifi installations. I should point out that both machines run Linux.

The Asus EEEPC suffers sometimes from having to many "dead" wireless connections in its database. This happens when you visit a lot of wifi locations that you will never use again (e.g. hotels ) in a short period. It is always a good idea to clean out your wifi connection points database periodically.

With my Acer, the problem turned out to be the fact that is was designed 3 years ago and has an old spec onboard wifi card. Once I disabled that....by stripping the laptop down as there was no option to do so in the bios, and then fitting an external wifi usb dongle, 90% of the problems went away.

Another point is that often hotels and hostelries have no one in-house that understands their wifi systems. I look after two such installations and I have, after much hassling, have finally got the staff trained "Pavlov" style to text me the moment the wifi goes down. Often a router reboot sorts it. However, where one has installations involving a router, a couple of access points, a bridge, it can be more complicated.

A final point, if you can find the setting in your wifi control panel, make sure that the channel select setting is set to Auto. Wifi can be broadcaat on anything up to 16 channels I think and this can complicate matter. Setting channel selection to Auto can often resolve this.