My laptop has had wifi troubles. So I want to to get a usb wifi adapter, and see if i can use that? Has anyone had a good experience with one in ubuntu? I don't know which chipset goes and with which product so I can't tell for sure.

For a start, one with a green status on http://linux-wless.passys.nl/query_h...php?hostif=USB
Is there a particular reason you want USB? I think cardbus (PCMCIA) is generally better - my laptop has a Netgear WG511T cardbus card which works great with madwifi.

I found this post:
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=146278

For this card:
http://www.circuitcity.com/ssm/D-Lin...oductDetail.do

If your laptop has an ethernet port, you would do much better by buying a wireless bridge. For example: http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=333. Don't be fooled by the "gaming" in the name. It works just fine with a computer, too. I have a DWL-G730AP. Works great with an old laptop I have.

The wireless bridge seems like the most likely solution since the laptop is old. Come to think of it I don't think it has USB 2.0 so that won't work.

The reason that I want something other than a pc card, is because I have a pc card and it stopped working. It's a linksys and it worked with ndiswrapper but i wiped the hard drive and on the reinstall with the ndiswrapper setup it doesn't work. The reason I got the card is because the onboard wireless doesn't work either. That stopped working awhile ago.

When the onboard broke, that would have merited me coming to ask on a forum like this, but I thought it was hardware troubles. What happened was that I turned on the computer one day, and when the wireless tried to connect to the network. It just froze the whole machine. The laptop was dual boot then and on the windows partition, when I tried it, it would invoke a blue screen of death. I just assumed that it was a hardware issue and I couldn't afford to get it repaired.

I got the pc card and that worked fine. Now however, when I try to connect with the card, it exhibits the same behaviour in linux. I've since gotten rid of the windows so i don't know if it would still behave that way in windows. For that reason i think it must be a similar hardware thing.

So, aside from the propsect that my laptop is falling apart, i figure i'll try another way of getting wifi on it. ethernet and usb and pretty much the rest of the machine works fine.