At work we came across an interesting problem with the Intel wifi cards in the Dell E-series Latitudes. People get disconnected from their home wifi networks. It’s happened for at least two people. Their notebooks work fine on the enterprise wide wireless networks.

It turns out that many consumer quality access points that people use at home do not properly implement a power saving feature that the new Intel cards support, called “power save polling”.

The fix is to go into the wireless card device properties in device manager, and change the power management settings. Unchecking the “default/auto” checkbox and dragging the slider over to “Maximum/High Performance”.

Intel has a knowledge base article up on their website here: http://www.intel.com/support/wireless/wlan/sb/cs-006205.htm

Another reason to stay away from the consumer brand network hardware!