My new Acer netbook is a delight. I’ll probably write about that at some point, but there’s one thing that’s annoying: The wireless card flakes out. What happens is that One moment I have wireless, the next it’s dropping, and even though Windows says I’m still connected, Nothing goes through. Trying to repair the network connection leads to an error message.

At this point the only thing that helps is to shut down the computer and start it again. That sucks. I’ve tried a bunch of driver updates, power saving settings and other tricks suggested in different forums and blogs, but to no avail.

Yesterday’s experiment seems to confirm that it’s a heat issue: I had the PC standing in my relatively cold bedroom, turned off the fan control utility, and it was happily downloading stuff for almost 48 hours. Then I turned up the heat a bit, put the netbook on the bed, which makes air circulation worse, and within an hour, the network had dropped again. So until a fix is released, I’ll need to provide my precious with good air supply and a chilly office.

Oh well.