Placeholder for now - have to catch some sleep before work at 8am tomorrow... but the good news is....

Drumroll please...

The ze4560us is compatible with Atheros Mini-PCI cards! Not only will it enhance your reception, but Atheros cards are some of the most well supported in Linux through the madwifi driver project. Also, these cards are available in Tri-Band models (that's 802.11a/b/g) for a similar price to that which you would pay for a PCMCIA 802.11g only card. And the icing on the cake: it's WPA-compliant
I highly recommend looking into getting one if you have this laptop. It will greatly increase your coverage and will enable you to start using the card with native drivers - which have all kinds of advantages.

Like I said earlier, this is merely a placeholder post for the time being. Eventually it will have pictures of how to install the card and some explanation about what modprobe commands to use, wpa_supplicant configuration, etc.