Thinkpads Forum

Hi all,

I'm trying to repair one of my Lenovo Thinkpad T430s wireless issue, and i'm at a loss now. A friend brought it in and said that they hadn't been able to connect to the wireless for about a week. I did the normal process of troubleshooting as you would. Finally figured that it might be a bad card. Got a new wireless card from ebay (pretty reputable seller at least from the reviews), and installed it last friday. Once I booted up and installed the drivers, everything came up no issues and looked great.

This morning he came into work (we work together) and told me that when he went home, the wireless signal wasn't showing. Once he popped in his Ethernet cable the wireless channels showed up and was able to connect. However this morning it was acting, once again, that the wireless was disabled.

I went back to Lenovo's forums and was reading that people claimed the power options might be an issue. So I went in and set the wireless network to maximum performance no matter what on the power plan he was using, still nothing. He also mentioned that he downgraded from Windows 8 to 7, so I went and installed the software for key mapping the function keys. Once I did that and did function f5 for the wireless, it said that the radio switch was turned off. I tried turning it off and on, still nothing. I even tried putting it in the off position and trying fn f5 again...no joy.

So anyone have any insight I could use to solving this issue? I would really appreciate it.

Thanks!!

emadrak wrote:Hi all,

I'm trying to repair one of my Lenovo Thinkpad T430s wireless issue, and i'm at a loss now. A friend brought it in and said that they hadn't been able to connect to the wireless for about a week. I did the normal process of troubleshooting as you would. Finally figured that it might be a bad card. Got a new wireless card from ebay (pretty reputable seller at least from the reviews), and installed it last friday. Once I booted up and installed the drivers, everything came up no issues and looked great.

This morning he came into work (we work together) and told me that when he went home, the wireless signal wasn't showing. Once he popped in his Ethernet cable the wireless channels showed up and was able to connect. However this morning it was acting, once again, that the wireless was disabled.

I went back to Lenovo's forums and was reading that people claimed the power options might be an issue. So I went in and set the wireless network to maximum performance no matter what on the power plan he was using, still nothing. He also mentioned that he downgraded from Windows 8 to 7, so I went and installed the software for key mapping the function keys. Once I did that and did function f5 for the wireless, it said that the radio switch was turned off. I tried turning it off and on, still nothing. I even tried putting it in the off position and trying fn f5 again...no joy.

So anyone have any insight I could use to solving this issue? I would really appreciate it.

Thanks!!

I had this issue also, one word thing i noticed was that the wifi would work when i squeezed the forward left side of the laptop. My laptop had this issue when i was on vacation, so i had to crack the car open and re-seat the physical toggle on the motherboard. What i did was set the toggle to non-airplane mode and removed the physical toggle. If needed, I enable airplane mode via the OS. Just leaving this here to help others.

Go into device manager/properties/power management for that wifi card, and UNtick the save-power option.