Vista - admin privs needed to enable network adapter on school LAN

I'm a school Technology Director and we've recently purchased 7 Vista
Ultimate laptops from Dell for our Special Education teachers who travel
around the building and must do data entry from home. They connect to both
ethernet and wireless, depending on where in the building they are located.
We do not have building-wide wireless due to cost and the fact that we may
build a new school within a year or two.

The problem is this: my users do not have Administrative privileges. As
some of these users use wireless at either home or work, the LAN adapter gets
disabled. Then, we they try to connect to the LAN again, it says they need
administrative rights to enable the network adapter. Sometimes this happens
after a hibernation, as well. I checked the power settings and it seems to
occur whether or not they have the network adapter enabled or disabled when
the laptop is running on battery.

1) Is this behavior by design?
2) If so, is there a way around it? Group policy, registry setting, etc.?

Thank you,
Pam McLeod
Director of Technology
Alton School District
Alton, NH
pmcleod@xxxxxx

Hello,

If I understand the issue correctly, the problem is that the WIRED NIC gets
disabled. There is a setting in the Dell QuickSet utility that turns off the
WIRED NIC if the laptop is running on battery and no cable is plugged into
the NIC when it is powered on. If that's the case, you have two options:

1) Disable that feature in QuickSet, or
2) Have the users shutdown the laptop completed, plug the network cable in,
then boot up. (A restart might be ok also, but I haven't tested that.)

--
Regards,

Martin X.
Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator: Messaging
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

"altonPM" <altonPM@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news6F70877-82EB-472F-A3AC-70DCC258652D@xxxxxx
I'm a school Technology Director and we've recently purchased 7 Vista
Ultimate laptops from Dell for our Special Education teachers who travel
around the building and must do data entry from home. They connect to both
ethernet and wireless, depending on where in the building they are located.
We do not have building-wide wireless due to cost and the fact that we may
build a new school within a year or two.

The problem is this: my users do not have Administrative privileges. As
some of these users use wireless at either home or work, the LAN adapter
gets
disabled. Then, we they try to connect to the LAN again, it says they need
administrative rights to enable the network adapter. Sometimes this happens
after a hibernation, as well. I checked the power settings and it seems to
occur whether or not they have the network adapter enabled or disabled when
the laptop is running on battery.

1) Is this behavior by design?
2) If so, is there a way around it? Group policy, registry setting, etc.?

Thank you,
Pam McLeod
Director of Technology
Alton School District
Alton, NH
pmcleod@xxxxxx

I am having the same issue. The problem with my machines is that the user can turn the radio on. But they do not have the permissions to enable or disable the wireless adapter in Network Connections. If anyone has an answer to this that would be awesome. I have been fighting this for about 3 months