Author Topic: Airplane Mode  (Read 2145 times)

Offline andrewalston

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Re: Airplane Mode
« Reply #9 on: Thursday 13 December 18 12:04 GMT (UK) »
Many laptops have a hotkey to toggle the wireless function on and off. Sometimes it shows an "airplane" symbol, more often a little mast with "signals" being transmitted from it. It's often one of the Fn keys, though the box I'm currently on has a separate row of touch-sensitive buttons above the physical keys. Some, usually older, boxes have a physical switch to turn wireless on and off.

In addition, some boxes are set up so that plugging in a wired connection automatically turns off wireless, commonly promoted as a power-saving feature. In most cases it is counterproductive to try to use a wired and a wireless connection at the same time.

The box I recently set up for my auntie had "airplane mode", brightness and volume controls on the Fn keys, all too easily caught. As a heavy user of those function keys, I found it a real pain to use.

Luckily, these things are commonly adjustable in the BIOS menus, accessible at start-up, so I rapidly adjusted things to normality, where it needed Function+F12 to turn WiFi off. The "power-saving" feature can also be adjusted on every box I've seen it on, either in the BIOS or from the operating system.

Windows also has its own "flight mode" toggle, tucked away in "Settings", "Network & Internet".

Incidentally, "WiFi" is a shortened form of "Wireless Fidelity", and is intended to show that the device can interoperate wirelessly with any other box with the same badge (using the term for a wired connection is just plain wrong, and leads to confusion).

In the early days, there were competing technologies; there still are, but every box needs to support a common standard, referred to as "802.11b", just in case.

"802.11a" was defined first and is faster, but "802.11b" was easier to implement, so became the must-have.
Looking at ALSTON in south Ribble area, ALSTEAD and DONBAVAND/DUNBABIN etc. everywhere, HOWCROFT and MARSH in Bolton and Westhoughton, PICKERING in the Whitehaven area.

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Offline [Ray]

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Re: Airplane Mode
« Reply #10 on: Thursday 13 December 18 12:12 GMT (UK) »
Hi     

Basics first . . . . .

Have you tried turning off (at the mains as well as equipment) all of the equipment trying to function wirelessly?     

Including the router?     

Wait 5 minutes ,then turn the router back on, wait for it to complete boot up properly     

Then turn each piece of kit on.     


Ray

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"You can’t give kindness away.  It keeps coming back". Mark Twain (?).

Offline groom

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Re: Airplane Mode
« Reply #11 on: Thursday 13 December 18 12:31 GMT (UK) »
I still don't understand this - Lizzie says she is using Wi-Fi but that her laptop is connected to the router by a cable. Surely Wi-Fi means that you are not connected by cable and receive signals wirelessly? 
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Offline LizzieW

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Re: Airplane Mode
« Reply #12 on: Thursday 13 December 18 12:34 GMT (UK) »
Andrew - Thank you for solving the Flight Mode problem.   The Fn 12 flight mode key is very near to the backspace and delete keys on my keyboard, so easily touched by mistake when I'm typing in the near dark.  ::)  So I've now turned off the Flight Mode in Settings, Notifications & Actions, Quick Actions. 

Ray - Thank you. The other niggles we've learned to live with for the moment.  I know, from experience, that one way to stop the laptop freezing etc. is to make sure I shut it down every night as, if I forget, then the laptop definitely freezes.

Thank you to everyone who has offered suggestions and opinions. I'm going to ask for this post to be completed now.


Offline LizzieW

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Re: Airplane Mode
« Reply #13 on: Thursday 13 December 18 12:37 GMT (UK) »
Groom - I have no idea what I mean.  ::)  All I know is that my laptop is connected to the router by a cable with a yellow end (is that relevant?) which my husband says means I'm linked by WiFi to the router.  As I understand it, if there is no cable between my laptop and the router, that is a wireless connection.

Offline andrewalston

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Re: Airplane Mode
« Reply #14 on: Thursday 13 December 18 12:49 GMT (UK) »
Are we right in saying that you are using a cable because the box freezes at random when you try to work wirelessly? (carefully avoiding the term "WiFi" ;D)

Wait 5 minutes ,then turn the router back on, wait for it to complete boot up properly     
Ray

Most modern routers will use the boot-up time to "listen" to the other networks in the area, and then pick the least congested channel. This might clash with a device which is used only intermittently, such as a baby monitor or the remote for a garage door opener.

These other devices can cause havoc for WiFi on the same channel, especially if the people who wrote the device drivers cut corners on error detection.

Most routers let you override this behaviour and pick a numbered channel in their menus.  The trick is to find a channel which is not clobbered by the interference, and this might take a few days of experimentation. Keep a note of which channels you have already tried.

In a city centre, there may not be any free channels to select, even manually. I remember a library in Manchester where I had trouble connecting to their WiFi, because I could not scroll far enough down the list of networks before my box refreshed the list. There must have been 50 visible in the list.
Looking at ALSTON in south Ribble area, ALSTEAD and DONBAVAND/DUNBABIN etc. everywhere, HOWCROFT and MARSH in Bolton and Westhoughton, PICKERING in the Whitehaven area.

Census information is Crown Copyright. See www.nationalarchives.gov.uk for details.

Offline LizzieW

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Re: Airplane Mode
« Reply #15 on: Thursday 13 December 18 13:02 GMT (UK) »
Andrew - that's right and usually when my husband is using his tablet behind me and he is using the router wirelessly.  Imagine a room with my desk and laptop facing one wall and my husband's desk and his tablet facing the opposite wall.  There is exactly 104 inches (8ft 8inches) between my laptop and the router.  But it seems when my husband is in the way I lose the signal and, you're right he only uses his laptop intermittently.  To my left are patio doors, leading into a conservatory and it is when the lights are on in the conservatory that I try to use my laptop in the dark, rather than going across the room to switch the light on.  Now, it won't matter because I've turned of Fn12 Flight Mode.

Offline [Ray]

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Re: Airplane Mode
« Reply #16 on: Thursday 13 December 18 16:08 GMT (UK) »
Hi     

I think that Andrew almost got it.     

The reason I suggested to "restart" the router was to refresh IP addresses     

If your laptop is set to grab the same ip address from the router each time you connect but your OH's machine has already grabbed it, then yes you probably will freeze if the router/drivers are ageing.     
You would need to logon to the router and assign the mac address of your laptop to an ip address "further down" the ip addresses available and make it "permanent" eg it always uses (say) 192.168.1.101.Do the same/similar as per your husbands to say 192.168.1.102.
If you have modern fones, ( anyone got a new one? ) they will give you similar problems, and can be handled in the same way.eg 103 for yours, 104 for UH's.If you allow visitor's fones onto your router then they will cause similar potential problems, but shouldn't if you carry out the above .     
     Your router documentation should show how to do.


The problem re channels is slighltly different as "most" modems use 2 (or 3) channels and if they "clash" with neighbouring routers' channels then you will be "sharing channels" with neighbours thereby slowing down connections because of higher traffic.   

You can get your router to select other channels permanently.If you really want to fall asleep at your laptop then read this,     
https://www.howtogeek.com/197268/how-to-find-the-best-wi-fi-channel-for-your-router-on-any-operating-system/     


As in most of these cases, find a local tech to review, discuss, action.

Ray
   
"The wise man knows how little he knows, the foolish man does not". My Grandfather & Father.

"You can’t give kindness away.  It keeps coming back". Mark Twain (?).

Offline andrewalston

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Re: Airplane Mode
« Reply #17 on: Thursday 13 December 18 17:18 GMT (UK) »
Virtually every home router out there is set to use DHCP to allocate addresses, and it is a very simple and robust protocol, with low overheads. It's a very rare case where it misbehaves.

Everything gets reset when a home router gets restarted. Whether wired or wireless, each box should ask for a new IP address. There are a few machines which assume that a short break in service can be ignored, but anything over 10 seconds ought to make a box ask from scratch once reconnected.

Of course the router is going to use the same rules to allocate addresses as it did last time, so boxes connecting will be likely to get the same address they had last time. Many boxes allow you to define "fixed" values to allocate to particular machines, if you really need to. Not many people do.

Looking at ALSTON in south Ribble area, ALSTEAD and DONBAVAND/DUNBABIN etc. everywhere, HOWCROFT and MARSH in Bolton and Westhoughton, PICKERING in the Whitehaven area.

Census information is Crown Copyright. See www.nationalarchives.gov.uk for details.