Thinkpads Forum

I feel like I smell a rat with the wireless switch on my T60.

I was under the impression that this is a hardware switch. That is, that when off, it disables the wireless devices at the hardware level, foregoing anything that software might try to do. This impression was reinforced for me by the fact that if the switch is off and I try to connect to wifi in Access Connections, I get a pop up that tells me the wireless is not working and perhaps disabled in BIOS.

However, lately sometimes when I turn the switch off, the wifi LED remains on. Even more common, I'll startup the computer after using wifi, the last time it was running, and the wifi LED comes on even though the switch is off. I usually have to disable Wifi with FN+F5, then turn the switch off, and then the switch seems to go back to it's normal behavior.

Moreover, I've recently been shifting over to using Ubuntu and there I've found that, for wifi, the wireless switch does nothing at all. Wifi works perfectly fine regardless of what position the switch is in (although the switch does still seem to effect bluetooth). I'm using the MadWifi driver. I briefly tried Ndiswrapper and the Windows driver from Atheros, which made the wifi LED work and the switch.

I wish the switch did still work though (and the wifi LED). But I don't want to use Ndiswrapper because it was unable to show signal strength in the network-manager applet.

Anyway, what's up with this switch?

i dunno why you are using funky drivers (perhaps you like the interface better) but the switch works 100% of the time for me using standard drivers

I got ubuntu running on my T60 too. I'll check the behaviour of the switch later this day, since I'm on my desktop pc right now.
I've never actually used the switch before - does having the wireless 'off' increase battery life a lot?

frankausmtank wrote:I got ubuntu running on my T60 too. I'll check the behaviour of the switch later this day, since I'm on my desktop pc right now.
I've never actually used the switch before - does having the wireless 'off' increase battery life a lot?

Thanks, looking forward to hearing what you find.

I've found that when I disable wireless in the network-manager applet, it saves me about 1 w per hour. Although, as I've said, I'm not sure if disabling wireless in that way really fully powers off the wireless card or not. I'd like to know the answer to that.

In general, my battery life is much worse on Ubuntu (which from what I've read is generally a problem with Linux distros). There doesn't seem to be any one cause. So I'm trying to tweak as many little things as possible to get the battery life closer to what I get with Windows. 1 watt here and 1 watt there can add up.

The switch seems to work as it should:
I powered the machine with the switch being 'off' and network-manager didn't find an available wireless device; as expected. Also, the wifi-led didn't light up a single time during the boot process.
The wireless chip was still visible in the 'device manager', but most details of it were blank or unknown.

I then flipped the switch, and network-manager connected without problems. Interestingly, when I switched it 'off' again, network-manager didn't really disconnect - the signal simply dropped to 0%. Similar when I switched it on again - there was no real reconnection, the signal was just 'there' again.

But overall, the switch seems to work as it should. My machine doesn't have bluetooth, so I can't comment on that.
Also, I don't have the atheros card but the intel one, using standard drivers.

This reminds me of something: When I started experimenting with linux, I had a Win95/RedHat dual boot. Also, I had a 2nd testing harddisk in my system that I used to disable in bios when I didn't need it.
Well.. In Windows it was gone, in linux - not the slightest difference

Huh, that's curious. So are you using the MadWifi driver or Ndiswrapper? Not sure what you mean when you say "standard" drivers.

I wonder what's up with my switch? Like I said, I've seem some weird behavior in Windows too, though usually it works okay. So maybe it is my unit and not Ubuntu/MadWifi.