[karlman]

Hello everyone,

I'm a new Dell mini 10v owner as of about a week ago. Thanks to the great info everyone here provides, I have managed to get it set up for dual boot of Win 7 starter and Snow Leopard without any problems. I am amazed at how well everything works so far. Today, I ran into a small snag with my wireless connection and was hoping someone here can provide me with a quick sanity check. I have been reading the forum off and on today to see if I could find someone that had posted a similar issue. My apologies if this has been asked or covered before. All of my various searches have only turned up much bigger problems than what I have encountered. For all I know, it may not even be considered a problem.

Im going to post my question before the description of my situation so that it might save some of you the time of reading my somewhat long description. My question is whether it is at all possible to re-enable the wireless in SL after it was disabled in Win7 on a dual boot system? It's not a huge problem to reboot into Win7 but I was just hoping to save some time if possible. Below is the description of my situation in case you need more info.

Due to some of the locations where I take my 10v, I sometimes have to disable the wireless. This function has worked perfectly for me in both systems. Most of the time I am working in SL when I have to disable. I usually forget to turn it back on before shutting down or rebooting into Win7. The Win7 installation never has any trouble with the wireless being re-enabled after I do this. However, today I was in Win7 with the wireless disabled via the Dell wireless enable/disable utility. As is typical for me, I did not re-enable it and booted into SL. Once it booted, I discovered that the wireless connection could not be enabled.

Thanks

karlman

[minimalpc]

Originally Posted by karlman

Hello everyone,

I'm a new Dell mini 10v owner as of about a week ago. Thanks to the great info everyone here provides, I have managed to get it set up for dual boot of Win 7 starter and Snow Leopard without any problems. I am amazed at how well everything works so far. Today, I ran into a small snag with my wireless connection and was hoping someone here can provide me with a quick sanity check. I have been reading the forum off and on today to see if I could find someone that had posted a similar issue. My apologies if this has been asked or covered before. All of my various searches have only turned up much bigger problems than what I have encountered. For all I know, it may not even be considered a problem.

Im going to post my question before the description of my situation so that it might save some of you the time of reading my somewhat long description. My question is whether it is at all possible to re-enable the wireless in SL after it was disabled in Win7 on a dual boot system? It's not a huge problem to reboot into Win7 but I was just hoping to save some time if possible. Below is the description of my situation in case you need more info.

Due to some of the locations where I take my 10v, I sometimes have to disable the wireless. This function has worked perfectly for me in both systems. Most of the time I am working in SL when I have to disable. I usually forget to turn it back on before shutting down or rebooting into Win7. The Win7 installation never has any trouble with the wireless being re-enabled after I do this. However, today I was in Win7 with the wireless disabled via the Dell wireless enable/disable utility. As is typical for me, I did not re-enable it and booted into SL. Once it booted, I discovered that the wireless connection could not be enabled.

Thanks

karlman

The Windows Dell utility is the equivalent of a physical wireless switch like you find on many laptops. It flips some unknown bit somewhere (possibly in a hidden part of the BIOS). There is no equivalent tool to unset that bit in OS X. When you disable wireless in OS X, it just disables it in the OS X software and will have no effect elsewhere. The solution is to disable wireless in Windows by similarly disabling it in software, not by using the Dell utility. I.e., right-click on the wireless adapter in Network Connections and disable it.

Note also that resetting the BIOS to default settings MAY reset the bit and re-enable wireless.

[karlman]

Thanks for clarifying that for me. I was thinking of the Dell utility as being equivalent to a soft enable/disable.