Wifi radio woes, or which card to replace broke Intel cards with?

So both my laptop (MSI GX640, running Windows 7 Home Premium and Linux Mint 11) and my partner's laptop (Gateway EC1405u, running only Linux Mint 11) have Intel wireless radios (mine, the Wifi Link 5100 and hers the Wifi Link 1000).

Both of them are finicky about connecting in N mode, especially with certain brands of router. They are fine with my own router (a Netgear) but are annoyed by other brands of routers (D-Link, Linksys) with stock or custom firmware. My roommate's router, the one we are using, is a D-Link, and thus our connections are finicky.

For the past few days my partner's wifi radio would refuse to hold a connection to the internet (but still be connected to the router) until I disabled N mode on the iwlagn driver. Now it seems to be stable, but I'd really prefer to enable N mode...

Mine is less finicky, to the point where I don't have to disable N, but it does drop connection with annoying regularity. From what I've gathered, the drivers for these Intel wireless radios are buggy. I don't really want to deal with it anymore, so I'm wanting to replace the cards.

Question is, which card to replace them with? I believe her card is a half-height one and mine is a normal-sized PCI-E card. I'm pretty sure that neither my laptop nor hers make use of a whitelist.

 

So far i haven't seen problems with the intel 6200, using a Linksys router with both. Then again, the 1000 in the T420 works just fine with my router as well. I'm hesitant to recommend Atheros adapters since i've had bad experience with them. The Bigfoot adapters maybe, they seem to work well even though they are based on atheros chips.

Even if your adapter is a full height, you can buy a half to full height adapter from ebay. Just make sure you have antenna wires that are long enough.

EDIT: Just out of curiosity, could the problem actually be with the roommate's router. Some D-Link models are pretty bad, do you know the exact model of his router.

 

I have had issues with the channel and what else is on that band. Only place I was able to get more than G speeds was in the middle of nowhere house..