I recently helped one of the guys from work (who's just set up on his own) with the purchase of a new laptop, monitor, printer etc. Called Dell ordered a Latitude D531 (iirc) and the correct dock along with all the other bits and pieces.
Long story short.......basically the laptop doesn't properly enable the wired connection when its returned to the dock after he's been out and about. I've googled and found that whereas in XP the hardware profiles would take care of the docked and undocked states in Vista this feature has been removed and (if I understand it correctly) Vista does the hardware detection on the fly.
As with most things you do for the computer semi-literate you check (and double check) everything works before you leave them but once you're out the door they start panicking and things go wrong for no apparent reason. When he couldn't connect to the net he called BT and/or Dell (i was at home for xmas) and tech support managed to get the wired network connection running again.
Is there something obvious i've missed? I know its not very elegant as a solution but could i write a bat file to run whatever commands the BT/Dell guys did to bring it back online everytime it forgets where it is?
Long story short.......basically the laptop doesn't properly enable the wired connection when its returned to the dock after he's been out and about. I've googled and found that whereas in XP the hardware profiles would take care of the docked and undocked states in Vista this feature has been removed and (if I understand it correctly) Vista does the hardware detection on the fly.
As with most things you do for the computer semi-literate you check (and double check) everything works before you leave them but once you're out the door they start panicking and things go wrong for no apparent reason. When he couldn't connect to the net he called BT and/or Dell (i was at home for xmas) and tech support managed to get the wired network connection running again.
Is there something obvious i've missed? I know its not very elegant as a solution but could i write a bat file to run whatever commands the BT/Dell guys did to bring it back online everytime it forgets where it is?