My laptop randomly freezes only when on battery power and when connected to a wifi network | Tech Support | Forums

So, I have a problem with my laptop.  Whenever it's running on battery AND connected to a wifi network, it will randomly freeze to the point where I have to hard reset it and lose entire open documents (it actually sucks to be working on something important and watch it all disappear).  If I'm plugged into a power source or connected to Ethernet, it never freezes, but it's a laptop, so I'm not always near a wall with an outlet or near an Ethernet port.  I did some reading and it appears that many people have had the same issue.  Sometimes it's a faulty battery, and sometimes it's an incorrect call from the wifi driver that throws the OS into an infinate loop.  So, does anyone have any ideas?

If it helps, the laptop is a Dell Studio 1555 that was running Kubuntu 10.10, then OpenSuse 11.3, and now Linux Mint 10.  All three OSs had the same issue.  I put one of Hexxeh's builds of Chromium OS on a flash drive and booted from it and it had absolutely no problems at all with wifi and the battery.