I had an interesting network problem today. I arrived at work, plugged my laptop into the power, and then into the network cable, switched it on only to find that I had no network connectivity. After rebooting twice, and discussing it with my colleague sitting next to me who has pretty much an identical laptop, connected to the same router, with no such networking problems, I did a bit of poking around.
I have a latitude D820 running Windows Vista, and the Dell Quickset power utility. One feature of quickset is that it disables the internal network card if you are not using it and you are on battery power, to get a few more minutes of battery life. It turns out that it must be a bit buggy as this turned out to be my problem. It had disabled my network card from the night before, and admittedly I had suspended my session, but then this morning, even after plugging into the power at work, and after rebooting my system twice, my network card still failed to respond. I fixed it by explicitly setting in the quickset UI to "always activate on battery".
Posts
We have run into the same problem with XP... however, after resolving that, the next problem is that the quickset settings are not being saved. We would correct, reboot, and would have to correct again.
ReplyDeleteI have this problem on a D820 with XP. The issue is that regardless of what the settings in QuickSet is the only way the internal NIC works is to have the laptop docked in the docking station.
ReplyDeleteNo amount of tweaking the Quickset application, updates, downgrades has gotten the internal NIC working when the laptop is at home and just powered by it's power adapter. Very annoying..
While the Laptop is docked delete the undocked profile. To do this, dock your system and then right click on "My computer" and select properties.
ReplyDeleteChoose the "Hardware" tab then click on profiles, 2 should be displayed, one labeled docked or docking which should be marked as "current".
If you select the profile that is not in use you should then be able to click the delete button to remove it.
Once it has been deleted, shut your system down and then restart it off the docking station, windows should then redetect all the hardware and rebuild the undocked profile which should make your NIC usable again.
Good job! I've been struggling with this problem for several months. I'm sending this response from my undocked laptop using the wired network connection. Awesome! Thank you.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much!! I deleted the undocked profile as you said and viola! After shutting down and booting back up it was fixed! I even just rebooted one more time to make sure. The NIC was still enabled. However, the Dell Quickset still won't keep the "always activate on battery" option. Oh well Dell... at least the NIC works.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the solution!I have been spedning a lot of time to solve the issuem finally found this article, and found it to work. Happy endng.
ReplyDeleteYou guys are great, we have been suffering this problem since the dell 520 was new 2 years ago! finally fixed. thank you.
ReplyDeleteI think Hedge laying in Devon is usually referred to as steeping and involves cutting and laying steepers (the stems) along the top of the bank and securing them with crooks (forked sticks).
ReplyDelete