Wireless Adapter Turns Off Under Vista

"Thanks for everyone's suggestions on this - I'm sure they would have been useful in the majority of cases!

However, since my initial post we've been in touch with the manufacturer and much to my disgust this behaviour is inherent to the machine - there's no way at all to change it. Apparently this is to prevent interference when travelling by air with your laptop! I've never heard anything so ridiculous - it's not the manufacturer's responsibility to control this, it's the owners - but there you have it.

I'm answering my own question here so people might find this - it's definitely worth checking before buying a new notebook! I'm still aghast some manufacturers are doing this but certainly won't be buying a machine with this ""feature"" again."

"My brother was having the same problem on his dell laptop (vista home premium). Wifi connection on that was not consistent. You have to enable and disable wifi radio using some Fn key combination. Few seconds after that Windows was looking for wireless network and trying to connect. But didn't connect successfully to any wireless connection.

I connected second laptop on same network. So it wasn't wireless router issue.
I thought there might be some error while getting ip address dynamically. So I changed wireless connection > ip address v4 to be static from dynamic. But this didn't work.
At last, i thought of checking if this laptop had Windows Vista SP2. Guess what It didn't. I updated the machine on wired connection. After update, wireless started to work without any issue.

Hope This helps."