Wifi range issues and intermittent dropouts, Thinkpad Edge

If I am more than a couple of metres from my access point (and I'm seeing this across various APs) with my newish Thinkpad Edge 15, running 10.10, the wifi performance becomes ... flaky. When this is happening, I see the following in dmesg, although I'm not sure if it's related:

[ 2497.011099] intel ips 0000:00:1f.6: CPU power or thermal limit exceeded
[ 2502.012711] intel ips 0000:00:1f.6: CPU power or thermal limit exceeded
[ 2507.009254] intel ips 0000:00:1f.6: CPU power or thermal limit exceeded
[ 2512.008367] intel ips 0000:00:1f.6: CPU power or thermal limit exceeded
[ 2517.007467] intel ips 0000:00:1f.6: CPU power or thermal limit exceeded
[ 2522.006558] intel ips 0000:00:1f.6: CPU power or thermal limit exceeded
[ 2527.008157] intel ips 0000:00:1f.6: CPU power or thermal limit exceeded
[ 2532.007251] intel ips 0000:00:1f.6: CPU power or thermal limit exceeded
[ 2537.003838] intel ips 0000:00:1f.6: CPU power or thermal limit exceeded
[ 2542.005427] intel ips 0000:00:1f.6: CPU power or thermal limit exceeded
[ 2547.004496] intel ips 0000:00:1f.6: CPU power or thermal limit exceeded
[ 2552.003611] intel ips 0000:00:1f.6: CPU power or thermal limit exceeded

lspci -vvv has the following to say about my wireless adapter:

03:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Centrino Wireless-N 1000
        Subsystem: Intel Corporation Centrino Wireless-N 1000 BGN
        Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR+ FastB2B- DisINTx-
        Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx-
        Latency: 0, Cache Line Size: 64 bytes
        Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 49
        Region 0: Memory at f0500000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8K]
        Capabilities: <access denied>
        Kernel driver in use: iwlagn
        Kernel modules: iwlagn

If I get within a couple of metres of the access point, I still see that output in dmesg, but the connection stabilises.

My question is threefold: how do I get better wifi range, what can/should I do about those messages in dmesg, and most crucially, are the two related?

As ever let me know if there's other information that would help!

Edit: I am using this machine in exactly the same locations I used my previous Thinkpad (T61) running various older versions of Ubuntu, so I definitely feel there is something wrong, rather me having unreasonable expectations of range!

Turn off wireless N. It's still finicky on intel chipsets. If you did some other custom stuff(like turn off hardware crypto for injection) then it's not a real issue and consider it a side effect of your tweaks.

modprobe -r iwlagn
modprobe iwlagn 11n_disable=1
should disable it...
modprobe iwlagn 11n_disable=0
should enable it...

then if toggling solves your problem in /etc/modprobe.d/intel-5300-iwlagn-disable11n.conf
options iwlagn 11n_disable=1
or
options iwlagn 11n_disable=0

whatever solved your problem