by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2012/10/13 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2012/10/13/10359319.aspx
My wireless went down last night on my Dell Latitude E6500. My third favorite machine and the only machine I had with me over at Claudia's house.
Darn.
My first thought was that I had accidentally hit that weirdly placed "turn off wireless" switch, but it looked Okay.
This led to my second thought.
I told Claudia it looked like her wireless router was unavailable.
That happens from time to time, and meant that her son West would be up from the basement in a few minutes because he couldn't get on XBOX360.
he's quite the gamer, that one!
Anyway, Claudia reset the router, as usual.
Still no connection!
Then she looks over at her machine, and the wireless connection is fine.
My wireless card was broken?
Damn.
So I call Dell.
The woman immediately knows what to try.
"This might not work" she says, "but what you said about how often you'd hit that wireless shift got me thinking. And I'm right you'll be up in no time. If I'm wrong I'll get someone over to replace the card."
I have Complete DellCare Next Business Day Onsite Service,, which might be why she'd was being so nice. :-)
She brings me up the wireless info screen by hitting F2 after the reboot, and we go to the option to turn off the WLAN switcher. I uncheck the box and reboot.
Back in Windows, the wireless is back!
Wow, solved the case in under 15 minutes. They should pay her more. :-)
Then she says "if you want someone to come out and replace the switch and maybe the card, I can..."
"But," I interrupt, although the engineer in me would like to have stuff working, I hate that switch. Would I ever really want t have it enabled?"
"Exactly!" she responds. "I'll give you some more things to check on, but if its working I say we call it fixed."
She gives me the case number if I find something else and have to call back.
Overall a really great experience!