is WiFi reliable when travelling?

I travel a half dozen times a year and need to use my laptop when travelling to access my office and do a little work remotely. My old Dell Inspiron laptop (WinXP) and my old desktop (WinXP) connect reliably to my home network, my old laptop connects at about 3/4 of the hotels I visit.

I decided that I needed some new equipment so I bought a new laptop for myself and my company provided me with another new laptop, both Vista of course. Neither one connects to my home network very well, so I started doing some research and discover that a lot of people with Vista have wifi connection problems to their home networks. If I end up buying a new router or whatever it takes to connect reliably at my home network, then what do I do when I travel? Will I have continual grief with a Vista computer vs. the reasonable reliability I've had with an XP computer?

 

I've been traveling with a Vista based laptop for a couple of years now and have never had issues, it's more to do with the wireless card you have than Vista in my experience. If you make sure to download the latest firmware for your router and wireless card it might help things out.

 

Traveled with a laptop for more than 3+ years continuously with XP Pro versions SP1-SP3. Found the Xp Pro SP2 version the most reliable so far.

Most important, to my experience, is to have a stable XP Pro install with not too much stuff running. Protect unstable spells (it's windows afterall) with DriveImaging (Ghost) and Win system restore points.

 

I have a Dell Latitude with the Intel 5300 wifi card in it. I did some research on this site and was told that this was the best card available.