Well, I've had it. My home machine (Dell XPS2 notebook) has been giving me fits ever since I got it. The machine itself is fine, but the WiFi portion has always been iffy at best! Driver upgrades helped somewhat but without fail it'll drop connection about once every few hours and if there's a LOT of heavy traffic it'll drop once every 10 minutes or so! To get connectivity back, one must disable the card and re-enable it. Tonight, I finally got sick of it and decided to see if another card might work better. I swapped in an OLD Lucent/Agere ORiNOCO MiniPCI card. PROBLEM SOLVED! It's utterly amazing, I haven't dropped once despite doing around 65MB of file downloading and uploading. A side benefit is that the notebook runs much MUCH cooler. Apparently the Intel was a bit hot running.

Weird, my HP has the same chipset and is the best I've ever had...

Myst be a Dell thing

dell laptops leave a lot to be desired from my experience with about 3 of them over the years.

both my IBMs have been rock solid

I have the same chipset in my Inspiron 600m and it's a nightmare. Drops connections all the time

I have an Inspiron 9200, but I chose the Intel 2200 because I did not want the 802.11a frequency. With this chipset I have never had a problem.

There is a fix for this, but I have no clue where I saw it (I read about two dozen tech websites a day). I know.. "Big help". Sorry. Might try a Google search on the issue.

The fix, as I found numerous places on the internet, was the latest drivers which didn't help. I forgot to mention that I had Dell send out replacements twice. Nothing helped. So, Scottsie ya might be right and it might just be a Dell thing.