Some plain yet interesting (or frustrating) experiences here,

Moved to a new house, installed DSL with a 5-year old SMC wireless router, two XP desktops and one XP laptop work just fine with DHCP enabled in router. Problem occurs when trying to hook my Linux laptop in.

No matter how hard I tried, DHCP or static IP, Linux box just refused to talk to the router, no DHCP request whatsoever, Network packet sniffer could not get any traffic out of Linux box. While dual boot in XP can work just fine with the same laptop, I started to suspect that my Linux box Ethernet driver got corrupted, by going through the airport security. Next time I'll hand carry the hard drive and patiently explain security guards that it is _just_ a HD, not a bomb. ;-(

Well, before starting to dig into the drivers with helps from the community, I figured I've been using this router for 5 years, probably time for a new one. Bestbuyed a cheap (1/4 of what was spent on this old one) router, and, you guess it, everything just works!!

There is a saying that Linux works better with older HW than Windows, well, not with the router for me. ;-)

You got to retire what needs to be retired!