Man, I dunno how you tolerate that. I have a laptop, a desktop, a chromebook, and a tablet, but I use all of them. I guess the laptop gets the most use, the tablet is old, tiny, and runs a really outdated version of Android's OS
Anyway have you thought about taking the laptop to get a new adapter put into it or something? I'd suggest disabling the built-in adapter and buying a new one to see if that works, but if wired won't even work, I don't think that'd be worth the wasted money :\