My laptop is setup to dual boot Ubuntu 11.10 and Windows 7.
I've been having wireless issues lately while using Ubuntu that didn't seem to be affecting the rest of my family on their computers. Out of curiosity, I decided to try using Windows more to see if the connection was more stable under that OS. To my surprise it seems to be. I prefer to use Ubuntu for most things, so I'd like to figure out what is causing my wireless connection issues under that OS, but I'm really not sure where to even begin.

My google searches don't seem to be finding my specific problem, I keep finding pages about an inability to connect at all, as opposed to an intermittent problem. And all the pages I found about an intermittent problem seem to indicate hardware issues, which doesn't sound likely since Windows on the same computer isn't having problems.


Problems in Ubuntu:
* Wireless appears to be connected according to the status icon, but while surfing pages stop loading and email errors telling me it's lost connection. After a minute or two this resolves, but happens several times an hour. I do not have this problem at all when logged in under Windows.
* If the connection is lost all together (router reset, etc) Ubuntu sometimes takes 5 minutes or more to reconnect. Windows reconnects within a minute of the connection coming back online.

Yes, dual boot works fine, it's just wireless internet is glitchy under Ubuntu.

This is my 4th wireless router in 5 years. After replacing so many in such a short period of time for a variety of problems, I decided to quit buying cheap routers and get a nicer more powerful model. It is less than 6 months old. Disconnecting our wireless printer when not in use seems to have fixed all other wireless connection issues with every other internet enabled device in our house, including the Windows installation on the laptop that's having issues. I'm just having issues with Ubuntu staying connected on this laptop.

Could also be that Windows and Ubuntu are using different loadable wireless firmware.