Hi Tara!<br><br>I've been using Ubuntu for 5 years now and have a couple of Acer Aspire machines at home that I've managed to get the wireless working on, so we should be able to get you sorted without opening up your machine.<br>
<br>I charge $50/hr (because otherwise I get too many friends and family support requests!) but only if successful. Since you can plug into the cable modem to download stuff, I imagine we can get you sorted in less than 2 hours.<br>
<br>Of course, I can just help out via email for free. :)<br><br>Generally speaking, we need to figure out what chipset your machine uses - Acer has a bad habit of changing this during a model's lifetime. A lot of their laptops use Atheros chips, which require one of 3(!) different drivers depending on the exact version used. Searching for "madwifi" or "ath_pci" will turn up lots of detailed information.<br>
<br>John C Barstow<br>Lower Hutt<br><br>