wireless network problems

Why not a LinkSys wireless card? It's usually best not to mix brands when it comes to wireless networking, maybe networking in general - I forget. I use a linksys wireless usb adapter, so I can place the antenna on top of my desk for clear reception.

Are you sure you are getting a strong signal? Believe i or not, you may actually be getting interference from wireless phones, cell phones, and some other sources (like your microwave or powerlines). This may be causing you problems. Are there any other access points listed? If so you may want to change the channel your access point is using. Conflicting channels can cause problems.

I know i was using a usb wifi adapter and it was always dropping connections. I got a pci wifi card and it immensly improved the connection reliability. Probably due to the fact that the pci card has a decent attenna and the usb has a crap one. Perhaps the microsoft card you got has a weak attenna. try downloading http://www.netstumbler.com/ which will attempt to find all wifi access points near you, and give you their signal strength (with a graph) if your card is supported (probably is). I used it for testing a few times and its quite a handy tool.

You can also look into getting a stronger attenna for your router. Where is your laptop in relation to the access point? I almost can gauruntee its some interference that is causing the disconnects. How long does the repair take? Perhaps you should set a static ip for the pc, or look into tweaking some of the access point settings. check google, and remember to write down original settings.

Which linksys router did you get that does not have ethernet ports on it? Most of the linksys wifi routers have 4 ports on them for pcs that are wired.

Note:
A strong signal is not always a good indicator. Especially if you are using the signal indicator from teh windows wifi control since its very unresponsive. Is your link running at 11mbs (i am assuming its 802.11b or is it 2mbs? This is important because most wireless cards and access points will attempt to throttle their connection speed depending on the signal quality. Thus you may see a great signal strength, but its because you are running at a slower link speed. When the card attempts to neogiate higher speeds, the connection drops because of too much interference or too much range between the laptop and access point. You oculd try forcing the acesspoint to run at a lower speed setting and see if it works better.

Also a usb adapter may be better then the pcmia adapter since you can better orientate it to face the access point, even buuild a dish for it (lookup pringle can attennas and other cheap aluminium foil based range extenders) that you can build for next to nothing, and dont need to modify the router save attacting some card boarda nd foil to the attenna. This makes it directional, but gives more range (sometimes as much as 2x). Though being directional means you lose the go anywhere aspect and restrict the area to more of a cone then a sphere.