My first gen retina has problems connecting to certain WiFi points. Netstat shows an assigned ip that's out of range, while others continue to receive regular I

My first gen retina has problems connecting to certain WiFi points. Netstat shows an assigned ip that's out of range, while others continue to receive regular IPs. Renders it useless for helping teach Rails development/googling to find solutions to others' issues. Waiting for a thin, light, no os laptop that works well with GNU/linux