Centrino wirelessN 1030 intermittent connectivity on brand-new laptops

Hi,

I saw some other mentions online of intermittent internet connectivity using the factory-installed Intel Centrino wireless-N 1030 card on various new Dell computers running Windows 7, but didn't see any resolution to the problem.

I can connect directly to my router via an ethernet cord, but trying to use the wireless card gives me intermittent connectivity.  I will pretty quickly lose the ability to load a new page if I'm browsing with IE or Firefox, and can regain it (temporarily) by disconnecting/reconnecting or letting the wireless manager troubleshoot, during which it resets the wireless adaptor.  Doing a continuous ping of my router gives me anywhere from 30-70% data loss and lengthy round trips (I am currently one foot away from the router).  Other (ancient!) computers work fine on my router; I have updated the router's firmware/reset it many times, etc).  I didn't specifically go download a new driver for the wireless card, but going into its properties and having it search for an updated driver results in it reporting it already has the most up-to-date driver.

I spent a lot of late nights talking to Dell support, and their eventual fix (after a complete reinstall from the factory setting partition) was to set up my home network as a WEP, which I'm not happy with due to it's poor security compared to WPA2/WPA.  This appeared to resolve the connectivity issue (why??).  But I feel like I should be able to use WPA2 security with a brand-new laptop.  So I changed it back to WPA2/WPA and tried installing all the critical updates that Windows Update could find, including SP1, and then looked at some continuous pings of various webpages and of my router itself.

Then I noticed my ping round trip time was awesome and they were 100% successful while my computer was plugged in with the power cord, but this unfailingly changed to reporting unsuccessful pings and having 1000ms round trips as soon as I disconnect the power.  Seems like the on-battery power settings are starving the wireless card???

Also, I'm sure my initial intermittent connectivity (before the complete OS reinstall) was still occurring while plugged in with the power cord, so I'm not sure if the reinstall fixed some aspect of the problem, or whether the appearance of success while plugged in now is just temporary.  Perhaps my card is just bad and I need a new one?  I was hoping you could help me attempt to resolve this with power setting changes.  If that is the fix, it would certainly help other users as well --- I'm using the factory default power settings and the factory-installed wireless card (and I couldn't choose a different wireless card when I built my laptop), so I assume this is a widespread problem.  Thanks!!

Fox