I finally resolved my issue with the wifi dropping under windows 8.1. I found that Dell had another version of the 1601 a/g/n/ac atheros driver. I loaded that, and now the system has been running for 5 days without dropping the wifi. So apparently Microsoft changed something from Win8 to Win8.1 requiring manufacturers to rewrite their drivers.
The whole reason that I moved to Win8.1 is because I have a 3200x1800 display and a 1920x1080 external display. win7 and win8 both do not allow for multiple dpi resolutions, forcing the windows dragged from the laptop display to be huge (size wise and font wise) on the external display. That can easily be fixed on the external display, but when dragging it back to the internal display, everything became microscopic. Win8.1 fixes this by allowing each monitor to have it's own dpi scaling.