Unreliable connectivity - Intel Centrino Wireless-N 1030

I have a relatively new (few months) laptop of my own running Win7 x64 with an "Intel Centrino Wireless-N 1030" wireless network adapter. For some reason, I have serious problems connecting to most wireless networks. On my home network there are rarely problems, but when I attempt to any other network (college, or public hotspot, or neighbor's open wireless) there are often issues.

By "issues" I mean: when I first attempt to connect to the network in question, I'm usually able to connect to the first few sites I try to access, but usually after a second or a minute or a few minutes of normal connectivity, I'm suddenly unable to access anything. The browser's response is that DNS lookup has failed; when I record an IP address (via ping-command prompt) and type it in manually after this point, the browser's response is that "##.##..." is taking too long to respond, etc..." No other program is able to connect either. I have tried setting different DNS servers but it has had no visible effect. At this point, the only thing I can do to reconnect is to either wait a long time for the connection to reestablish itself (which can take an hour or more and isn't guaranteed) or to go to Device Manager and disable and reenable the wireless adapter, which then *sometimes* allows me to reconnect for a few seconds or a minute or an hour before connectivity breaks again. When the connection fails, Windows displays the computer as being connected to the network, but usually with the "Limited or no connectivity" alert. The Windows troubleshooter can't figure out the problem.

I have done virus scans and multiple shutdowns / restarts and have updated the 1030 driver to the latest version, but the problem still persists. Google shows many others to have had somewhat similar connection issues with the 1030, and the advice given is often to disable the Bluetooth portion (through Device Manager) - but doing this hasn't had any noticible effect on my machine either.

Even when connecting to outside sites/networks is impossible, I am still able to get a ping response from the router(s) via 192.168.1.1. Weird.

For some strange reason, connecting to my home network has kept working mostly as normal. Although I've had this problem for a long time, I never noticed any problems on the home network until a few days ago (strange) - connectivity is starting to fail for a time there as well.

At this point I'm not sure where to look to work on fixing the issue. I'm guessing the problem is with the wireless hardware, but that's just a guess - does anyone have any other suspicions of where the problem might be? Or does anyone have an idea of what could be done? Any help or points in the right direction would be appreciated.