Dead Problem Fixed(I hope) / Wireless Problem Questions

I first would like to say that those who are frustrated by the problems, hang in there! The Aspire One is a great laptop and ideal for what I wanted to do. I am a graduate student at a university that provides accounts on a mainframe server to do work. Needless to say I wanted a laptop to be able to take notes in class, internal wireless (Because external cards are a real pain and I have stepped on the card in my laptop bag before), reasonable battery life, didn't overheat, and was lightweight. My last laptop, a Dell Inspiron 8500, came with external wireless, was really heavy, and had a major overheating problem. The Aspire One's lack of a hard drive (I have the Limpus 8gb internal sb 512 mb ram one ) makes overheating nearly impossible.

For those people who have issues when they start up and get a blank screen with an X, I will explain my trials and conclusions. First, I tried limiting the things I did with them. Instead of installing all liveupdate and every program I wanted, I started narrowing down programs. I eventually (so far..month running) narrowed it down to the following three programs: Open SSH Client, VLC, and the xfce start up. With those three, I have installed and used Open SSH a few times (Although when I was trying to avoid it, Putty worked fine for me! ). I have not yet installed vlc, but I am nearly willing to bet it's xfce. When you get a blank screen with an x, it's the x windows server failing to start. Granted, vlc may write stuff into some folders that causes issues too, but I also had gotten the problem when vlc wasn't there. If you're getting real frustrated with this problem, google (or someone might be nice enough to provide a link) for how to use the standard gnome-like desktop rather than the xfce one. For me, functionality was much better than a sort of cool xml script making a sort of cool looking display.

Now for my issue. I looked over the rest of the issues and couldn't find anything in my first quick scan, so I decided to post on it. If someone has a forum this stuff is already being discussed, post a link and I thank you in advance. Sometimes when I am using the wireless it suddenly will turn off. Normally I would think this is normal, that it somehow lost the connection. But I am stationary and the connection is an access point from a university somewhere close - not too too likely to be losing connections. The stranger part that I lose my connection is that it is not the connection I lose - it's the device. If I do an ifconfig, ath0 is NO LONGER A DEVICE. The flipswitch still is on.

Here is what I know about this problem so far:
1) I am leaning towards it potentially being something to do with the battery changing some kind of state - assuming the battery has many levels other than the "LOW" it informs you about.
2) To fix it, you boot it down, pull out the battery, replace it, and boot it back up.

I was wondering if anyone else experienced this and how they might have dealt with it.

Thanks!

 

You are right, it is being discussed on other threads.

I had the same issue.

Updated the Wifi driver to 7.1.6.160 (see here: viewtopic.php?f=11&t=5873&p=40153&hilit=7.1.6.160#p38881

Flashed the bios to 3305 (look on the downloads page)

It has been running with wifi up for 48 hours now. Seems fixed.

 

Bump:

I use Linux, those drivers on that page are for Vista and XP only.