Netbook keeps diabling wifi card

[iadubber]

Hello All,

Backstory: I have a cart with 30 netbooks in one of my middle schools. These netbooks ran Vista x86. We are now in the process of upgraded all of our win2k and vista up to Win 7 x86. I imaged half of these netbooks last week. There is about half Dell 2110s and the other half is MSI Wind U160s. Both models of netbooks keep disabling the wifi adapter. Under the student account they cannot go into the network sharing center to re-enable it. At first I thought it was a power management issue and the adapter was just not waking up. Since then I have reinstalled the latest drivers, unchecked turn off this device to save power, and set the power management GPO to never put the netbooks to sleep. None of those have helped.

 

Once re-enabled the will work for the rest of the day. It's not all the time either, the one netbook worked for 3 days and all of a sudden today the wifi card was disabled again.

 

Any ideas? Thanks

Chad

[Steve21]

As stupid as it sounds, have you disabled the whole wireless key/button combos? We had this on a bunch of laptops before, then just realised we forgot to disable the wifi switch Even with students locked down, they can do that either prelogin, or while logged in.

 

Steve

[iadubber]

Yes, the keys are disabled on the Dell 2110. The u160 has a physical switch, no Fn keys for wifi. The switch does work, but I have tested and tested and the card doesn't ever go to disabled when I operate that switch. It will X out the adapter, then when I turn the switch back to on it will reconnect on it's own. On the U160 there is absolutely nothing in the bios having to do with wifi. thanks

[Brpilot99]

This happens with ours if the kids shut the lid without logging off first !! It happens with XP when the machine goes into hibernate ... theres not a shutdown option for lid closing !!!!!

[iadubber]

I set the power management GPOs to never shut the computer down, sleep, or put into hibernate. It only dims the display after 10 minutes. I made those changes today so we'll see what happens tomorrow. A couple of them didn't have the new power mgmt gpos yet when I went down there today. I forced them all so we'll see.

[SYNACK]

Scheduled task on laptop startup that runs this The DevCon command-line utility functions as an alternative to Device Manager to enable the wireless each time if it is not already enabled maybe.

[iadubber]

I will give devcon a shot. thanks!