When a wireless network won’t connect: reason #54

September 26th, 2006 - 18:03 | 3 comments

I was struggling with a friend’s laptop that refused point blank to even detect the wireless network I knew was up and running. It turns out that there’s a button on the laptop itself that needs to be pressed before wireless access is enabled. I guess it’s to save battery life, or something. XP doesn’t seem to know about it and continually reports no wireless networks detected by the built-in device, but everything springs to life once the button is pressed. New one on me.

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3 Responses to “When a wireless network won’t connect: reason #54”

1 J Bird Sep 26th, 2006 at 11:13 pm

Nick has that on his laptop. It confused us a few times too.
2 Paul Sep 27th, 2006 at 10:39 am

Yeah my laptop has a switch to enable/disable wifi - it was a requirement of mine. Windows does a quick check for wifi and fails to notice its off. Hibernate is really your friend in these regards, windows can establish a hibernated connection much faster than establish a new instance of the same connection it seems. madness.
3 Andrew Sep 27th, 2006 at 12:24 pm

Is weird. How come you made it a requirement?

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