Thinkpads Forum

For the last few days, I have been having a problem with my T60, where it will spend a minute or so on boot trying to establish a wifi connection. It hasn't done this before (I've had this machine about 18 months), and I'm trying to figure out what changed.

My first guess is that there's a wireless switch on the front of the machine, which may have gotten bumped or something. The problem is that it's just a slider switch, with no way to tell whether it's off or on. Anyone know how to tell?

Perhaps I should make it clear that I never use wireless, and would like to have the radios &c shut off so as not to waste power & processor cycles.

Thanks

There is not a wireless switch on the T4x models (that I know of). I use Access Connections (and I do know not everyone likes this application). But I set A/C to only run my home wireless network and not to run any others except I as execute them manually. As a result, when not at home, my Wireless radio shuts off automatically. .. JDH

For the wireless switch, left is off and right is on if I remember correctly. I believe there is a little bit of green visible when the wireless is turned on.

That's correct about the switch. If the switch is in the off position, Fn + F5 won't work to bring up the black wireless radio control panel on my setup.

I'm just curious.

If you have the switch set to "on"....and you use FN+F5 to bring up the wireless utilities. You can switch off the wireless.....does that mean you can override the position of the physical switch via software settings?

Mr-Pacman wrote:I'm just curious.

If you have the switch set to "on"....and you use FN+F5 to bring up the wireless utilities. You can switch off the wireless.....does that mean you can override the position of the physical switch via software settings?

That is correct.

If the physical wireless switch is switched off, pressing Fn+F5 will cause a dialog box to appear requesting for the wireless switch to be switched back on.

So IOW the physical switch has the final say on whether or not the wireless radios will work.

Harryc wrote:

Mr-Pacman wrote:I'm just curious.

If you have the switch set to "on"....and you use FN+F5 to bring up the wireless utilities. You can switch off the wireless.....does that mean you can override the position of the physical switch via software settings?

That is correct.

Perfect. I like to switch off the wireless multiple times per day to save battery power, but wasn't sure if the little plastic switch would wear out or break over time.

Now i'll just turn it off/on via the Fn+F5 utilities

I use the fn+f5 software switch mostly to turn it on and off but it comes in handy sometimes to be able to physically cut off wireless access quickly with the hardware switch.

Thanks for the suggestions. I found the problem (sort of), and it wasn't the switch after all. It seems that /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wifi0" had somehow gotten changed so that "onboot" was set to yes instead of no, which of course caused it to try to start wireless on boot. Changing it back fixed the problem.

Now as for what changed the file... I haven't a clue.