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Daeta42Flag for United States of America

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HP Laptop will disable wifi when connected to LAN cable

My HP EliteBook 8540w all of a suddend when I put it in the dock it disables my wifi card.  Or when I just plug in a cable...  Most annoying when I want to be on 2 different networks at the same time...  Or when I am trying to go from the desk to a meeting.  It kills my work while trying to re-establish the connection.  Weird and it's making me grumpy....
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asidu
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Did you install any program recently?

If you are running windows OS, you could try to roll back the OS to an earlier point
when the machine was working fine.

If a recent software installation created the issue it will be resolved.
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Windows does this because it will pick the interface with the best metric. When you plug into wired it will most likey have better bandwidth than your wireless connection.
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ASKER

Yeah, I am running win 7 Ultimate.  I never had one of my NICs get disabled before.  I unerstand picking he best interface...  But, usually if I am coping or downloading a file via wifi and plug into the cable things still work, or vice versa.  But now, it just knocks all the connections off.  RDP, VPN,etc...  And I have to reconnect or restart everything if I want to switch from different physical devices...
Hmmm, yeah normally both should stay up and not disable in Win7. Have any bios settings changed. Any that refer to your network interfaces?
Hello,

I saw that behavior on Toshiba laptops. It was caused by Toshiba software for managing wired and wireless connections (sorry I can't remember software's name but it is by default shipped with every Toshiba laptop), and it is set by default to disable wireless if cable is connected.

Did you recently installed any HP software or maybe update it? If you did maybe HP changed default settings in new version.
Is your wireless card Broadcom? I found on the web that Broadcom cards have that ability. So if it is, there should be Broadcom software for wireless management (if you have HP OEM installation of Windows 7). Try to look there for some checkbox to check or uncheck.
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No, it is an Intel card.  And, it's not an OEM installation of Win 7.  I also just noticed that my "fn" F9 & F10 to adjust the brightness that the bar is empty and doesn't matter if I put the brightness up or down.  I have to re-install the video drivers or something like that...  
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Fidelius
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A little bit of work...  But you set me on the right track...  I had to play with all the device settings but I got it working...

Thank you!