I prefer Linux laptops to Windows laptops because of the security, speed, and robustness and last week I started configuring an old laptop with Windows Vista as the operating system. Vista was acting unreliable and I installed Linux on it to make a dual-boot arrangement. Linux was running fine except for the wireless networking card – it happened to work in Vista so I knew it wasn’t the hardware. That’s one of the advantages of having a dual-boot laptop- if some piece of hardware isn’t working in one operating system you can boot into the other one to see if it works there.  To troubleshoot this problem, I started Linux and then checked the networking settings and found no wireless running.  I had a hunch it was a hardware driver problem so I started Administration- Driver Manager and then entered my root password.  the Driver manager showed a Broadcom WLAN mini-card with an alternate driver available so I selected it tried to save the config.  Unfortunatley, it wouldn’t save and I gave up for a week.  I thought about it for a while and tried it again after I ran Linux updates and it found a couple hundred of them while the ethernet cable was connected to the router directly. The driver manager was run again and now the broadcom mini-driver saved  the wireless network config.  The network card is working now in Linux and web sites can be browsed again.

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