Inspiron 1545 losing internet connection

I have had my inspiron 1545 laptop for a little over a month now. Things were going great until last week when my laptop started losing the wireless internet connection periodically.

I can surf the internet for a little while, then the pages wont load and I get a message to check my internet connection. All other computers and video game systems are still connected to the internet, but my laptop won't reconnect until I restart it. Which is starting to get a little annoying having to restart once every hour. I use Firefox as my web browser and switched to IE to see if it was Firefox causing the issues, however the same thing happens with IE.

Also sometimes when I try to restart it, it will not restart without using the power button to shut it down.

Any suggestions on what I can do to fix this or what is causing it?