Setting up the wireless network interface

I used the /etc/network/interfaces file to setup the wireless NIC to accept WEP adhoc connections with the following:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet static
wireless-mode ad-hoc
wireless-channel 4
wireless-essid xxxxxxxxx
wireless-key xxxxxxxxxx

wireless-power off

I'm still not sure if that last line disables power management, since I'm using the iwl3945 driver, which supposedly already has power management disabled in recent kernels.