Graphical or automatic "keep-alive" program?

[Edgars Šmits]

I'm running 2 laptops via a weak WiFi connection and have Intrepid on
both laptops. The WiFi is weak as we don't want to drill holes in the
walls to bring it closer to our office space, and the connection
quality as indicated by Gnome's NetworkManager applet is between 55%
and 70% at best. As a result (at least to my way of thinking) of the
weak connection we keep loosing our network connections, up pops the
security window asking for our network passwords etc, a big pain the
ass - when the laptops are in the same room as the WiFi router and the
connection quality is 90% + this doesn't happen.

As a test for the last few days I have run a series of continuos
pings, and the network connection seems to be stable over many hours.
I then downloaded a command line app called spinner which also seems
to keep the network connection alive. For me this is no problem, I can
run spinner when I want a solid connection, however my wife doesn't
understand computers at all and so I can't ask her to do the same, I
need something that will either automatically function as a keep-alive
program or else I need to change some network setting that will do the
same for her (timeout limits maybe?)

Any suggestions? She has been using Ubuntu now for over a year and has
gotten to quite like it, but whenever these sort of things come up she
always questions why she can't go back to XP - our printer (HP1018)
and scanner (Canoscan something) are both problematic with Ubuntu but
work perfectly under XP (of course)....


Many thanks in advance

ED