Help for other Acer Aspire models?

I have an Aspire One which I love and is working great on Fedora 10...

However, I also have 2 Acer Aspire 5100-5674 laptops. One running factory Vista (my wife's system) and the other running Fedora 10 (my system).

I recently upgraded my home router from Netgear to D-link DIR-825 which supports draft-n. The AAO and 2 Thinkpads with Atheros cards work fine with the new router with their 802.11g connections. Both of the Aspire 5100's have problems with network connections pausing/stalling for about 30-40 seconds every few minutes. There are no errors logged on either laptop or the router. The 5100s both have Broadcom mini PCI wifi cards. I've tried to replace the card on one of the systems with an Intel 3945abg mini PCI wifi card, but it refuses to power up... power light goes on, dvd drive clicks, power off, repeat automatically.

I'm trying to get Acer tech support to work with me regarding either the "factory" Vista system... or talk to me about wifi card compatibility. I'm not expecting satisfactory results.

Does anyone here have experience with the 5100s and the wifi cards? Or can anyone refer me to a comparable forum that covers the 5100s?

I haven't tried contacting D-link about the problem to see if they have ideas or knowledge of issues with Broadcom cards... but that will be one of my next steps. I've always had either Atheros or Intel wifi cards in all my other systems and wasn't real pleased after I bought the 5100s and found the Broadcom cards inside. Moving away from Broadcom would be my first choice.

Thanks...
JW

 

try running without any encryption just to see if you get those issues.
Have you updated the drivers for the broadcom cards?
Are you running the router in dual band mode?

 

I'd already configured the 5Ghz off, running only 2.4Ghz with 802.11g only.

Since my original post I'd also switched my linux system to a different flavor of the broadcom driver... that showed some improvement. I was originally running the broadcom-wl package and moved to the b43 package from dangermouse (dnmouse.org). Instead of hanging for 30-40 seconds, the hangs are now almost unnoticeable, with only 1 ping missing a response every 5-10 minutes. I haven't found a newer driver for the Vista system yet... Acer's e-mail support said I should call their support number. So much for e-mail support!

Turning off the encryption didn't show any further noticeable improvements... pings still dropped a response periodically.

Any ideas on being able to replace the broadcom card with Intel? I don't understand why it won't power up... unless the Broadcom wifi card doubles as the bluetooth card and intel doesn't and that's what is choking the power on? I'll check more on the actual model number of the Broadcom card.

Thx.

jw