I have an AOA 150 (ZG5) Acer Aspire One. I’ve had it for a little over one year now and have loved the portability. However, since first getting it, I’ve been plagued with: instability, wireless data errors, wireless disconnection errors and the inability to sleep or hibernate in Windows and Linux. The problems have not been constant, but have certainly caused a good deal of frustration.
I recently upgraded the memory to 1.5G and updated the OS to Windows 7. In Windows 7 I saw that my problems were exacerbated, near constant crashes and wireless data corruption problems. Lots of people have solutions to the wireless problems that the Acer has, but none of them worked for me. In Windows 7 and Windows XP and in several distributions of Linux I must have tried at least 20 different wifi drivers, with not one of them actually working 100% correctly.
Then I started thinking… while I was upgrading the memory, I had to remove the Atheros wireless card that shipped with the notebook. What if I could swap it out for a new one? What if the Atheros was the cause of all of my problems?
So I did some searching and came across the Intel 4965AGN mini pci-e wifi card on ebay. Then I did some more digging and found that others had tried it and had success. I ordered one off of ebay for about $18 with free shipping and installed it in about 15 minutes.
I’m happy to report that I’ve been running for about 1 month now with the new wireless card and have had no problems at all. Windows 7 is nearly perfectly stable, Linux has great wireless stability, and I don’t have any data errors. It’s sad that Acer marred this otherwise great notebook with this crappy wireless card. But I suspect there is more to this story. Some people have generally good luck, some have a good experience after fiddling with it. Then there are people like me and the stories that I linked to. People who, with no matter how much fiddling, cannot get it working stably. Maybe there’s some subset of the devices used that have more problems than others? Either way, I’m glad to be past that now.
