I've never seen such devices and google doesn't seem to have either. Wireless routers do switching.

When did switches enter the conversation? Nobody called anything a switch. Just because something isn't a hub doesn't automatically make it a switch. Repeaters are repeaters and not to be confused with anything else.

The key difference between a repeater and a hub is that repeaters have to do processing to rebroadcast the signal whereas hubs are "dumb" and are literally just wires which makes them extremely cheap to produce.

Two replies that state what I already refuted. As I said the closest thing to a hub for wifi is a repeater, but they are nowhere near the same because repeating requires processing.

Title correction: Pick the one with the LEAST interference

Use NetStumbler http://www.netstumbler.com/ to determine the signal strength of all the other access points to see if any of the channels will have low interference. Although you may see lots of access points, they could be very feint signals because beacon frames are short at about 50 bytes (compared to 1500 for a typical data frame) so they're a lot easier to receive. The strong signal from your own apartment/condo should be able to drown out the noise from all the feint AP signals but if the people next door to you have an AP then it could slow you down so that's why you need to check for strong signals with NetStumbler.

There is no such thing as a hub with wifi. Hubs are devices that are "dumb" and essentially just extend a physical wire. Wifi has no wires so the wifi equivalent of hubs would be repeaters. Most consumers have wifi routers though.

Technical Colleges are mostly filled with people that should be flipping burgers. It's where people go when they don't have the grades or sometimes money for a real school. I'm suprised this fud made it onto slashdot (saw it on digg earlier).

This woman was clearly looking for any excuse to drop out and is blaming it on a computer instead of her own will but that's not even what the article is about. The article is slander with all its anti-linux rhetoric such as the following choice quotes:

"But something stopped her: Ubuntu. " - she could have told the dell tech what her problems were and they would have given her the easy solutions or she could have asked someone at the school. The only thing stopping her is herself.

"Schubert says she ordered her laptop online at Dell.com expecting to buy your classic bread-and-butter computer." - What would this story be about if she had gotten Vista or a Mac and it couldn't run the ISP install disc either? There is no such thing as a standard operating system and every computer user has to figure out how to solve problems that arise even if it means finding someone to fix it for you.

"She called Dell the very next day and says the representative told her there was still time to change back to Windows." - how could she change BACK to something that was never on it?

"However, we think we've helped her get back to school." - no you haven't, you just made a couple phone calls she would have made herself if she was truly interested in going back to school.