[TriLUG] Is My Wireless Card Bad?

[Randall Barlow]

I've been having a strange issue with the wireless network connection on 
my laptop.  As you can tell from some of my recent posts, I recently 
switched my laptop to Ubuntu from Windows.  The primary problem that 
stimulated the move was that I could not get my wireless card to stay 
connected to our home network, or any network for that matter.  It had 
been working for about 10 months with no problems before this, and all 
of a sudden it crapped out.  I tried reinstalling the driver, and 
nothing seemed to fix the problem.

So I switched to Ubuntu, and it worked... for a while.  Now I'm having 
similar problems again.  If I reboot the machine, it will connect to my 
home router (using WEP).  After a while (could be 5 minutes, could be 2 
hours) it will lose the connection, and I won't be able to get it to 
connect to any network (not even any of my neighbors unencrypted 
routers) unless I reboot the computer (shutdown, power on because Ubuntu 
won't reboot for some reason, a whole other problem altogether).

Something interesting to me is that I can still use iwlist to see the 
access points in the area, including the one that I want to connect to.  
Here is that iwconfig returns when the connection is working:

eth0      IEEE 802.11g  ESSID:"BETA"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.447 GHz  Access Point: 00:09:5B:E9:90:A8
          Bit Rate=54 Mb/s   Tx-Power=20 dBm
          RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=100/100  Signal level=-35 dBm  Noise level=-88 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

And when it's not:

eth0      unassociated  ESSID:"BETA"
          Mode:Managed  Channel=0  Access Point: 00:00:00:00:00:00
          Bit Rate=0 kb/s   Tx-Power=20 dBm
          RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality:0  Signal level:0  Noise level:0
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

    So, any ideas of what the problem could be?  My suspicion is 
hardware failure only because I was having similar problems before in 
Windows.  Is there any way to test if this is the problem?  The computer 
is still under warranty from Best Buy, so I could take it to them, but I 
suspect they'll say, "Linux, what?" and attribute the problem to that 
and be done with it.  Any advice or experience here?

Thanks,

Randy Barlow who's sorry for the high volume of posts to the list he's 
made lately