Wireless losing connection when going to battery?

I may be able to shed some light on this problem. When reading the descriptions of the various applications Dell installs on their machines, I found this little nugget:

Dell QuickSet

Application: Dell QuickSet, Application, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Multi Language, Multi System, v.5.8.0, A3

The Dell QuickSet application provides quick access to configuration settings for: POWER: --------------- - Power management schemes - Battery resource information and health. - The application also warns user when unsupported power-adapter/dock/battery scenarios are detected. DISPLAY: ---------------- - Desktop font scaling - Internet Explorer Scaling - Display brightness - Presentation mode - Display switching via Fn+F8 NETWORK/CONNECTIVITY: ---------------------------- - Radio/Wireless activity - Location Profiler - Internal network card activity (depending on your system)- The Internal Network Card will be deactivated when user goes to battery mode and the network cable is unplugged. Inorder to activate it, reinsert AC power source. If you want to bypass the installation of this feature run setup.exe with the param NO_NIC_PM (setup.exe -NO_NIC_PM) OTHER/SYSTEM SETTINGS: ---------------------------- - Volume status - Hotkey hibernate - MediaDirect (on certain systems)

Now, this is one of the many reasons that I format the harddrive and install a clean copy of windows on every new machine I get. (I also do a little research on any application, before I install it, in order to avoid nasty little issues, like the one above.) Dell's proprietary install fills the machine with needless applications - that can, as we see, cause problems - and adware from AOL. Let's not forget that they also choose to waste a portion of the harddrive you purchased, in order to store the recovery partition, which replaces the recovery discs that they no longer provide for free. I imagine that many people are pulling out their hair, as I type this, trying to figure out why the heck their wireless connection drops, the minute they go to battery. Well, for many, it will be due to an improperly installed piece of Dell software. I believe very strongly that my problem-free experience with Dell machines is a result of my practice of replacing their proprietary install with my own clean install, on a formatted drive. And, yes, I do remove both of the partitions Dell allocates for the restore.

-phil