I am about to move my Acer laptop to Linux from W7 so will check the wi-fi card in it, however it has been pretty good on W7 so should be OK.
My main reason for ditching W7 is that being 2 years old now it seems to have slowed down and I suspect it could do with a re-install which like XP in my experience usually speeds things up. My other problem is the lack of good photo handling software, I dont mean edit I mean album management, at a sensible price. Nothing to my mind comes close to Digikam under Linux (yes I know there is a Windows version but it is huge because it is not written natively for Windows). Since my wife mainly uses the lappy I can set it up so she really does not notice the difference using KDE desktop with LibreOffice, Thunderbird and Firefox, the only thing she will have to learn is Digikam.
Stuart