Anyone with a fancy new laptop having trouble connecting a wired network connection when out in the field? If it’s a new Dell laptop, they’ve added a power-saving feature that doesn’t work right.

The new “feature” is supposed to turn off the NIC when the laptop power & a network cable aren’t plugged in. It turns out that it shuts down the wired ethernet port completely when the laptop is on battery power - even if a cable is plugged in at startup. Who cares anyway, why should I have to reboot my laptop just to get reconnected after I restart a switch or redock the laptop?

BTW, Dell (and it’s $billions) should build something like Sony’s SmartWi technology and its ability to automatically toggle between WiFi, Bluetooth and WWAN connectivity - but Dell prefers to follow once someone else has done some development and marketing.

The affected Dell laptops have a Broadcom NetXtreme 57xx gigabit NIC. Unless you always have a wireless connection available, here’s how to enable the wired ethernet connection, and you can do it without a reboot so you don’t have to leave the NIC on alll the time:

1. Open the Windows Control Panels and then open the Internal NIC Configuration control panel
2. Check the Always activate on battery option and then Apply

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