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I searched and didn't find anything here on this.

I have a Dell Mini9 with XBMCbuntu 12.2 and it works shocking well.
I thought with an Atom processor and such it would be slow to play .iso movies.

Everything is great when using the wall-wart, but once I unplug the wall-wart and the mini is on battery, the wireless speed is horrid.
To the point where it re-buffers so much you can't watch a movie; and as soon as you plug the mini back into AC power, it re-buffers at in insane rate and then is totally solid until on battery again.

Almost like there is some power saving setting, but I can't find one.
Anyone have any ideas?

Regards, Matt

Maybe the battery alone isn't supplying enough power to the wifi. It's pretty common for a laptop to only be able to max everything out when plugged into a charger. I found this out recently on my own laptop.

However, I think you are on the right track in thinking it's probably a power savings settings. Powering the wifi shouldn't max it out, I would think.

Thanks for the reply Ned!

So I think I got it figured out thanks to this post..
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=123947
Seems to be working like a champ now on battery...
Here is the take away..

There's a significant difference in the iwconfig when unplugged. Above you see the line:
Power Management:off
When unplugged it becomes:
Power Management:on

To summarize what I found: pm-utils has a script for wireless management at /usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/wireless that runs whenever the power state changes.
If you create your own "copy" of the file in a different location, like so:
$ sudo touch /etc/pm/power.d/wireless
It will effectively override the wireless power management. In the interest of full disclosure, the answer I found was from people running Ubuntu, I imagine if you're more daring you could just delete the original file outright or neuter it or something, but I like this way since in case my battery life goes to hell I can just delete that file and be back to normal.