Hooking Docking Station up to WiFi router

Hello all,

I just got cable internet access and am setting up my system. I have a cable modem going to a D-link wifi router. What I would like to do is hard-wire my laptop's docking station to the router, so that when docked the computer is able to take advantage of the full speed of the cable connection. But I would also like to have a PC wifi card in the laptop so that when I undock I can access the internet wirelessly.

Will this work? I was thinking there may be some internal conflict if, for example, I try to access the internet while docked and the computer doesn't "know" what method (hard wire or wifi) I would like to use. Do I have to pull out the PC card every time I dock?

Thanks for any help

Reply to
Alaspor
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Thanks for not supplying any specific model numbers or operating systems. So, you get a generalized answers.

Most laptops have wireless on/off switches or function keys. Use them.

If your mystery wi-fi card has a driver that shows up in the system tray, then it will also have a right clikc to disable feature. The problem is that if you disable it, the icon may also disappear from the system tray.

Planting your mystery laptop into your docking station should create two different Windoze "profiles" as the hardware configuration is quite different in docked and non-docked. Specify that the wireless card is disabled or not present in the docked profile and it will switch to ethernet.

Toshiba laptops have a utility included that "autoswitches" the various LAN connections. Although you can live without it for just wireless and ethernet, throwing in USB networking and Bluetooth made it useful.

I suggest you read your docking station manual on how to setup profiles.

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Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Oops. Those were for W98/ME and W2K. For XP, see:

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Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

I didn't provide a model or OS because I am not sure what notebook I will use yet. I am pretty sure it will be a Gateway or an IBM Thinkpad

600 series. OS is Win 2k.

Jeff Liebermann wrote:

Reply to
Alaspor

There won't be a conflict. You might not control which access is used, but it should work.

Some laptops have different hardware configurations available in the device manager for docked verses non-docked.

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I manually disable my WiFi card when I'm not using it.

Reply to
dold

It'll work fine, the PC should assign a higher routing metric for the wireless card so the LAN route will be the chosen one.

When the LAN route becomes unavailable, the wifi route will take over.

I have had a problem when also running VMWare that the wifi card route metric got set lower but it's a trivial thing in the properties of the card to manually set a high metric to solve the problem.

David.

Reply to
David Taylor

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