I have an Acer Aspire (a regular laptop, not Aspire One) and after a year and some 9 months the wired network died. It would work for a little while after being powered up, then just stop working and after some more time just disappear from Device Manager as well. Wireless was still working, so I could still use Internet with it. I made a screendump showing the missing network connection in Connection Manager, and since I didn't wan't to let support be able to snoop around in my files, backed up the machine and installed Ubuntu on it. When I got it back from repairs about a month later, they had changed the wireless card... So I still had the same problem. Now it's probably back from repairs again, but I'm not back from work yet, so I have no idea if they have managed to fix it properly this time...

Stig