Wired/Wireless Automatic Switchover

[GeneralEclectic]

This is a Dell Vostro laptop with an Intel 5300 mini-PCIE network card in it. Win 7 Pro. The wired and wireless connections have different static (non-routeable) IPs set so they can (and do) coexist.

Both wired and wireless connections work perfectly, with one exception -- when the wired connection is present, the wireless connection continues to operate. I can disable it manually, but as soon as the machine reboots or even wakes up from standby, the wireless is automatically re-enabled.

This machine was originally equipped with a Broadcom mini-card. With that, the switching between connections was automatic after about a 10 second pause. That behavior went away when the Intel card was installed. That suggests that this is a driver issue, but perhaps there's a setting somewhere made by driver installation that governs this particular behavior.

Can anyone shed some light on this?

Thanks for reading!

 

[patwhatsthat]

Not sure if this will help to re-establish the apparent auto-switch of available connections, but it might be worth a try.
Type ncpa.cpl into the search box and hit enter. In the network connections window, select "Advanced" from the top menu bar and then "Advanced Settings" from the drop down. In the top frame of the Advanced Settings dialog box, select your wired connection and then use the green arrows to the right of the frame and move it to the top. Click OK to save your settings and reboot. See if that helps at all.

 

[GeneralEclectic]

No, dangit, it didn't work, but thanks for the suggestion. Looked promising too. There's no advanced adapter setting that controls this either. Strangely enough, the list of advanced settings for the Intel WNIC is a lot shorter than that for the Broadcom. The performance is clearly better so it's worth the nuisance, I suppose.

 

[patwhatsthat]

Sorry that, that didn't work for you.
I've included a link to a technet E-Learning Video, which may help. It's about 29 minutes long, but at about the 9 minute mark, he discusses the setting of the metric value for your adapters in the event that the automatic metric setting is not working for you. I hope this will help. Keep us posted.
Windows 7 and Network Connectivity