I'll give a quick overview of the problem first. I recently bought a new Lenovo Thinkpad X1, which has the Intel 1000 BGN wireless card. Since the day I bought it, I could not connect to any wireless hotspots unless I was within 3 feet of the router. I've tried updating the drivers (in windows 7 64-bit), and installing various Lenovo utilities for wireless connections, but nothing helped. (I have another hp laptop that connects fine, so it's not the router)
Enter Ubuntu. As a last ditch effort, I tried installing Ubuntu 11.10 beside windows, and the wireless worked! Upon rebooting into windows, and back into linux, now it doesn't work anywhere. This suggests to me that the windows drivers somehow muck up the internal state of the wireless card.
Is there a way to somehow reset a driver to its default state in Ubuntu?
It seems installing a fresh copy of ubuntu somehow did that, but I dont want to do that everytime I have a wireless problem.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions, and please let me know if I'm off track on any of this!
sudo ifconfig wlan0 down && sudo ifconfig wlan0 upwith whatever your wireless is. You can find that out withiwconfig– Rob Nov 1 '11 at 18:05