Laptop wireless connection problem

[Horatio]

this is a new laptop in a basement suite. the landlord upstairs has allowed my friend to connect to his network upstairs.
No problem.
Now, when the lady downstairs turns on her laptop, Windows will connect to the network and the signal strength is pretty good.

then, after about five minutes, the network connection fails. She gets the "Unable to connect to preferred network message".

After a reboot, she connects fine, but only for about five minutes.

At first I thought maybe it was the position of the laptop in relation to the upstairs setup, but it doesn't make any difference where we try it.
Anyone have any idea what might be wrong?

Have checked the (built in) wless network card properties to see if there is any kind of power management setting that could be shutting it down, but there is nothing.

I don't know what router they have upstairs as they always seem to be away.

[Sterling_Aug]

Is power management enabled on the NIC? It may be turning off the power for the NIC and dropping the connection.

[BipolarBill]

Update the network adapter drivers first. Also, be sure to use the Windows Wireless Zero Configuration:

http://www.smallbusinesscomputing.com/webmaster/article.php/3577111

[Horatio]

Thanks Stirling and BipolarBill,

Can't see any kind of setting in net card properties for allowing windows to turn it off to save power. Could there be a BIOS setting?

Will try updating the driver and the 'Kill WZC' batch file and see if that does it.

[Horatio]

It seems that a combination of re-installing the network card driver, (actually the latest version from the Acer support site was the same one I had, but re-installed it anyway) changing some hardware settings in Acer management so that only 'Wireless LAN' was enabled seems to have solved the problem for now.

I think it was WZC hunting around and finding other connections that was causing the connection to drop every few minutes, but not really sure.
If it does it again I will be able to confirm this by shutting off the service once she is connected to the network upstairs

thanks again guys