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Fn+F2: Disable wireless
Not every laptop uses this keystroke, but most seem to.
If you’re on a plane or in a hospital, you should disable your wireless receiver. Or suppose you’re riding in a train or car and you know there’s no wireless signal, you’ll increase your battery performance if you disable the wireless receiver.
Hit Fn+F2 and it’ll toggle wireless on and off. (Practice it a few times so you can recognize how the icons in the system tray appear, so you’ll know to switch it back on if you ever disable it by accident.)
on September 3rd, 2007 at 2:49 pm
Can you please tell me how to emulate in any way Fn+F2 when I am using an external keyboard? my laptop keyboard is broken and I am using an external USB keyboard
please send me an e-mail if you know the answer …
on September 4th, 2007 at 6:31 pm
I’m sorry to say, Costin, that I know of no way to emulate this using an external keyboard.
What type of laptop do you have? There is quite possibly an application supplied by your vendor which can easily disable wireless. For example, on my Dell laptop, there’s a system tray icon for their wireless manager; I can right click on it (with a mouse, horrors!) to get a shortcut menu for wireless options that includes disabling wireless.
Another choice is to use the Network control panel:
Ctrl+Esc to open the Start Menu
S for Settings
N for Network Connections
Up Arrow to highlight the Wireless connection
Shift+F10 for the shortcut menu
B for Disable
on April 21st, 2008 at 5:25 am
Sorry, that isn’t a Windows shortcut; it’s a Dell (and Gateway and others) shortcut. On other brands it does nothing. Fujitsu laptops have an actual sliding switch for the WLAN on most models.
on April 21st, 2008 at 9:42 am
Good point, thanks. As I said at the top, “Not every laptop uses this keystroke, but most seem to” — I’d guess about 80% of the laptops I’ve seen have support for it.