Making wireless survive standby under Vista
My Sony laptop (VGN-TZ398U aka PCG-4P2) has the horrible habit of forgetting about its wireless device when I put it to sleep/standby. When it wakes back up, I have to go through crazy steps to make it work again. The laptop is running Vista Service Pack 2, though Vista as shipped on the laptop had the same problem.
A while ago I created a batch file which I could right-click an “Run as administrator” to make the device magically work again:
rem Restart the wireless interface, needed on vaio vgn-tz398u after
rem sleeping. Run as admin.
rem
rem cf http://www.wlanbook.com/enable-disable-wireless-card-command-line/ for an alternative using DevCon.
netsh interface set interface "Wireless Network Connection" disabled
netsh interface set interface "Wireless Network Connection" enabled
But this has been a royal pain. Then I found the answer in a post “How do I get a Vista laptop over its wireless quirk“:
In your Device Manager, open up your network card and go to the Power Management tab. Uncheck (what should be) the first option, “Allow the computer to turn this device off to save power.” This will stop the connection from being dropped whenever the computer goes to sleep/standby. Many wireless cards don’t let you do this, but most, if not all, wired NICs can.
My thanks to the user niles on that site who had the final real fix for me. It’s working like a charm!
