My new netbook uses the rtl8187se wireless driver and this is another post complaining about Realtek support to linux users.

It would be a nice piece of news that it works out-of-the-box if the driver wasn't so unstable in WPA protected networks. I suffer from drops in throughput every 5-10 minutes, sometimes even less, that make the connection unusable.
In this ubuntu bugreport there are also users that claims that they have the same issue (2 years ago). Unfortunately, I lost all my hopes with Realtek in things related to fixing drivers. My experience (in this post) is that I wrote them 5 months ago about the sound driver issue in my HP Pavilion Tx2000 and they haven't even replied a "Thanks for the report. We will have a look at this issue". It's also worth to mention the shoddy piece of work that they did with the rt3070 driver (see this other post). At the moment, I'm using ndiswrapper with the winXP drivers. It works like a charm and I recommend it to everyone having this issue. You can download the Windows drivers here. Direct link.

I also discovered that there's a pyGTK GUI for ndiswrapper very suitable for your granma who wants to connect to her WPA wireless at home, but she can't do it out-of-the-box because Realtek didn't care about providing a decent driver. It's called ndisgtk and looks like this: