Question regarding my wireless feature. For some reason when I click on windows mobility center and no longer have the option of turning on my wireless signal. It's off and the "turn on" button is greyed out. How can I check to make sure my wifi still works or at a minimum turn it back on.
Networking – Dell XPS 15 – can’t turn wireless on (shaded out)
wifi-driverwireless-networking
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Looks like you found it, but the lecture is still needed here because this is dangerous.
Hidden SSIDs are actually WORSE than security through obscurity. Not only is there the obvious problem, that someone with wireless sniffing software will still get the SSID, there's also the not so obvious problem - in turning off the SSID broadcast on the router, the client has to do a form of SSID broadcast instead, and this happens no matter where the computer is being used - any time the computer isn't connected to a more preferred network, it will be broadcasting looking for the hidden SSID.
This gives an attacker a tool that they can leverage to trick your computer into connecting to a hostile network. Now not only is your wireless network not safe at home, your computer isn't safe anywhere either.
Use the strongest possible encryption (sorry, WEP doesn't count anymore), and don't make the problem worse by shifting the SSID broadcast from the AP to the client.
After playing with it for a few more minutes, I finally figured it out. It appears to be a bug in Windows, where flipping the switch on the computer turns on/off Airplane Mode, but when Airplane Mode turns off, it doesn't flip the Wireless back on.
I found two ways to fix it:
- Run the
Network Troubleshooter, by right-clicking theNetworkicon and choosingTroubleshoot Problems. It finds that the problem is that the Wireless is Off and offers to turn it back on. - Open the
Change PC Settings"Windows-8-Style-formerly-Metro-Style" app from the charms bar, go toWireless, and flip the toggle switch:
Neither of these is really a good solution, considering that the problem shouldn't be happening in the first place, but it's better than what I had to do before.
UPDATE (August 2013): While the problem still has not completely gone away, I have noticed that one of the most likely ways to trigger this behavior is flipping the wireless switch while the computer is booting up or resuming from sleep or hibernate. I often use a network cable when at my desk and I used to plug in or unplug the cable and flip the switch immediately when I put the computer down on the desk. Waiting for a minute or two for the machine to resume from sleep has reduced the frequency of the issue.
UPDATE (March 2014): I updated the computer to Windows 8.1 and the issue seems to have gone away.
Best Answer
Migrating from the comments...
Use Fn + F2 to turn the wireless on. That's the hardware keyboard shortcut that is independent of the operating system.