And I just thought of one reason you might get a dropped connection. Imagine the following scenario:

- You took your laptop traveling.

- While traveling, you deliberately connected to some random open access point while sitting in an airport or coffee shop or something.

- The random open access point you connected to had a generic default name such as NETGEAR or DLINK or something (i.e., whoever set up the access point didn't change its name).

- Back home, you are connected to your own specially-named access point (your home access point has a unique SSID that you assigned it, right?) and it is working fine.

- But your neighbor has an open access point where they left it with a generic defult name like NETGEAR or DLINK or something.

- Your laptop occasionally sees your neighbor's access point and occasionally tries to connect to it, thus dropping the connection to your home network.

The solution, if this is the situation, is to go into the "manage wireless networks" screen and delete everything but your home network, so that it doesn't automatically try to connect to any other networks.