Question

dell laptop and wired/wireless connectivity

Asked by: hmiller8513

i am having problems with dell network cards on dell laptops.  I know there are power savers setup and i think that i have them set correctly.  my problems seems to be switching between wired and wireless and being connected or not connected to AC power.  i would like to have the availability to be sitting at a desk plugged into AC and wired to my network ,then just unplug everything and go wireless and on battery.  the dell laptops that i work on do not seem to want to provide that capability

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Asked On
2007-07-09 at 02:28:40ID22682778
Tags

laptop

,

between

,

switch

,

dell

,

wireless

Topics

Wireless Networking

,

Wireless Technologies

,

802.11 Wireless Access Points

Participating Experts
2
Points
500
Comments
11

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Answers

 

by: captainreissPosted on 2007-07-09 at 03:38:38ID: 19444023

Hi

You may need to provide a little more info. Are both setups working independently, ie if you reboot into wirless, does the laptop connect OK? Are you only accessing Internet or other network shares too...?

If so your system should be capable of doing what you want. Both cards are treated as 2 independent physical connections so your laptoop needs to know which exit to take when you make a requerst to go onto another network source or Internet. It uses the default gateway to make this exit.

If you go to Start|Run => cmd to open command prompt, type IPCONFIG /all and you should see all your cards with their corresponding IP configuration. If your router is configured as a DHCP server than the e GW should be identical on both.

Let us know

 

by: trickz_2Posted on 2007-07-09 at 07:39:17ID: 19445519

I had a dell laptop and it did what you are looking for so they are capable of it. Make sure your wireless is working while you are docked. It will not hurt anything to have both connections connected at the same time. I did some simple test and found that the computer would use the faster connection if both were available. By default Dell laptops are set to power the nic off when they go to battery, you need to change that. If both links work while at the desk and the nic is set to stay powered when you go to battery, the wireless link should keep you connected, at least mine did after changing the power setting.

 

by: hmiller8513Posted on 2007-07-10 at 12:03:44ID: 19456771

the machines in question are all running XP.  They are on different networks.  These machines belong to my clients and are comprised of several models of Dell ( Inspirion and Lattitude).  IPconfig brings up address, subnet, and gateway addresses.  I can ping the router.

The common thread is that they are all Dell laptops.  If I am working Plugged in ( ac and wired ethernet) all is well.  If I decide to go wireless, without rebooting everything seems to be find.  If I reboot while wireless I now get no connection and if I take the computer and plug it into a wired environment (without rebooting or even with rebooting) I still can not get a connection.

I believe that there is a setting on the network card that corrects this problem.  It may be to set the nic up to stay on when the computer is on battery.  Where is that done? I want to make sure that I am in the right place.  Is there any other setting that I should change and , if so, how do I change it?
















del

 

by: captainreissPosted on 2007-07-10 at 12:32:48ID: 19456987

Hi

there is a setting where you can define power settings.

Goto Device Manager select the NIC and right click to access properties. There is a Power Management Tab. The option there is ticked by default, untick it but I have yet to see this making a difference.

try this first but I suspect if this does not work for you either that there is a AP setup issue at work rather than any software trouble.

All the best

 

by: hmiller8513Posted on 2007-07-10 at 15:25:09ID: 19458348

ap??????

 

by: captainreissPosted on 2007-07-10 at 15:48:35ID: 19458491

Accesspoint, sorry try to save on keystrokes...

 

by: trickz_2Posted on 2007-07-11 at 07:08:56ID: 19462759

so the real problem is not going from powered on the desktop to battery, it is booting up on the battery? This certainly sounds like the issue of the nic being powered off while on battery. We had the same problems with Dells. We always checked the power option first which was the problem on some of them. Others we had to remove the nic from the device manager and re install and then setup the wireless settings from scratch to get them to work correctly. We never found out why some machines had this problem and others of the exact same model did not. They also come with the third party manager, can't remember the name of it but switching back and forth between letting windows manage the connection and using the third part manager often resolved the problem as well. Again in the same model one would work better with windows manageing the device and the very next computer would work better with their management app.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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