I recently bought an ASUS EEE 1000HE, and while I love the battery life and overall speed of the thing, after I installed the latest chipset drivers and wireless drivers my wireless started dropping out - ping showed about 70% dropped (out of 100 pings). I researched it online, and found that there are changes you need to make to the configuration of the card in networking, under advanced - such as changing the power saving to CAM mode, and changing the MultiMedia/Gaming to Enabled. After this it improved, but is nowhere near usable.

So now I have done more research and found that :

the NE771 wireless card is an RALINK card, model RT2790.

the NE766 wireless card is also an RaLink card but sold under the Atheros Azureware name and uses chipset RT2860.

the third option for wireless cards in the 1000 series EEE netbooks is the NE785, which is also an Atheros card with an ralink chipset.


According to the sticker under my battery, I have the NE766. From reports online, I have a few options (none of which have worked yet, btw) :

The base driver that came with the unit : 1.4.0.0
the updated driver from ASUS : 1.4.0.1
the latest driver from ralink : 1.4.2.0
(be warned that if you install the non-asus RAlink drivers and utility, you cannot uninstall the utility easily. I had to remove the folder in "Program Files" disable a service, and uninstall a protocol in networking. You also have to start "Wireless Zero Configuration" and set it to automatic again in services.)