Laptops and Wired Network Connections
April 23rd, 2007 by JeffWelcome once again to the weekly edition of Jeff’s Tech Tip. This week we will look at an issue that many of you that own laptops may experience at one time or another. Have you ever turned on your laptop and connected it physically to a wired network and experience no network connectivity?
This may not be a problem with your laptop. On all PCs and laptops there are default power schemes setup. A power scheme tells the computer what devices it can turn off, when it can turn them off, and when the computer can go into standby or hibernate modes. When working on a desktop PC, these power schemes are only noticeable when it turns your monitor off because of inactivity, or turns off other components due to inactivity. However, on a laptop, there are many other situations where power schemes affect your computing experience.
One such situation would be when you are running your laptop on battery power. On many laptops, including those made by Dell, when you are running on battery power, they will dim the laptop’s display. While this may make it harder to see some items on the screen, it serves to save battery power for your laptop. So how do power schemes affect my laptop’s ability to connect to a wired network? It turns out that one of the devices that these power schemes think that they can turn off to save battery power is the wired network connection. This seems to be a reasonable measure to save power as most people that use their laptops on battery power utilize wireless networks instead of wired networks. The simple solution when using a laptop on battery power is to ensure that you plug your laptop into power. If this solution does not work, then please Contact Austin Lane.