Wifi

Well a most wifi cards ..etc. Will work with no problems. The easiest way to know is to buy a cheep brand name card, most of them would work. You might have to reinstall ubuntu to get the card working though.

Jesse,

Does your current laptop have a wireless card? if so, what card is it? If in doubt, type these commands and post the output:

lspci
lsusb

In case you want to install another wireless card, be it internal or USB, I'll recommend anything with a Ralink or Realtek chip, also older Atheros cards will work fine. And you do NOT have to reinstall Ubuntu to get your wireless card working, if the card is supported you just plug it in and it will work.

Guillermo Belli: I just said that because I plugged in a usb modem for my friend and it didnt pick it up. I put in the live cd it picked it up and worked fine after I reinstalled ubuntu.

shane fagan: That may be because you needed to install an additional package for the usb modem to work, and if the modem was connected during installation, the required package would be installed automatically.

Thanks for the info.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/WirelessCardsSupported

Hmmm, i can't find a page of top 10 recommended cards or anything like that. The nearest i could find looks at the problem from the wrong angle. Hope the link helps somehow though. Perhaps copy&paste the table into OpenOffice Calc and then resort but taking care to include the entire lines rather than just the relevant columns. I guess importing it into Base as a database would make sorting the columns less prone to muddling everything up

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/net/wireless/cards.html

A bit less specific to Ubuntu but does have some nice chat about the issue generally and linux generally.

Happy hunting :)