Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Laptop uses WLAN before LAN

This comes up when I use my laptop on a dock where I have wireless enabled and Ethernet plugged into the dock. Its common for laptop users to want their wireless enabled while roaming. To fix this issue you can change which connection is used first.

Windows 2003/XP

  1. Start Button
  2. Control Panel
  3. Network Connections

Windows 2008/7/Vista

  1. Start Button
  2. Control Panel
  3. View Network Status and Tasks
  4. Change adapter settings (Vista is Manage Network Connections)
  5. To get the Advanced menu up press the ALT key

advanced options

Once you are able to get to the advanced menu click on advanced settings.

advanced dialog

In the upper section you can move a network connection up or down. That connection on the top will be tried first. In the case of the WLAN always online and plugging into dock once the LAN connection comes online WLAN will not be used until LAN connection is unplugged. This can be issues on servers or other computers with more then one network connections but more commonly laptops use two different network connections for the same network purpose.

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