weirdest problem....

[waterhead]

I don't think that Dell sells any computers with Atheros wireless in them, so maybe their software isn't made to work with them.

[techieMoe]

Second, Techiemoe, you were right. I never actually realized that if a computer doesn't have an actual switch it still has hotkeys. I have a hotkey with Fn+F2 that turns off the wireless radio. I booted into windows, installed dell software and saw a big x saying "Radio Off", I enabled it and it gave me a "Your card radio is still off press Fn+F2 to enable"....problem solved


DOH! Sometimes.....

Glad to hear it. Sometimes we can get so caught up in more complicated reasons for something not working that we forget about the simple stuff. It's happened to me more than once.

Just a side note, I think I would have caught this if the Atheros card wouldn't have worked....but it did....anyone know why that card would work despite the radio being disabled with the hotkey on my computer?

I'm not sure about this, but it's possible that if the killswitch is tied to a hotkey then it's up to the individual manufacturer to figure out how it is handled on the device itself. What I mean is, perhaps on a Broadcom the keyboard command will disable something on the physical device that stays that way until you manually flip it back on, but for the Atheros card they just keep track of the state of it in the operating system (thus making it show up as ON when you were in Linux even if the state was OFF in Windows). I'm just guessing here.