Ok, I'm sick of dealing with it.  Their Mini PCI and Mini PCI Express cards seem to suck.  I've had an AR5212 Mini PCI card in my IBM T42 since it was purchased in 2004 - and it just drops tons of packets every minute or two.  No amount of debugging revealed any problems.  I used to have an AR242x card in my Eee, but it was replaced recently, and provides a much more stable connection.

The drivers suck, too.  The older MadWifi[-ng] drivers were decent, but the development team decided to ditch them and completely rewrite the drivers (ok, I understand why - non-free drivers aren't fun).  This (so far) has produced filth like ath5k and ath9k that drop even more packets.  Totally useless… and it even made its way into the GNU/Linux 2.6 source tree!

I think I'm going to avoid the Atheros hardware, from now on.  I'll be picking up an Intel Mini PCI card for my T42, now, too - even if it doesn't have 802.11a!

</rant>

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