Dell Laptop NIC issue -- Odd Mystery Solved

A friend brought me a Dell laptop yesterday.   I don't recall the model number but it was approximately 2 years old. She said she couldn't get it on to our network using the Internal NIC card.  I told her to bring it to me and I'd take a look at it.  I promptly plugged in a Cat-5 but the Internal NIC remained disabled.   What gives?   This was truly a mystery.  I checked all the DHCP setting and such.  Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, yet I simply could not enable the NIC. 

After about 20 minutes, the battery was beginning to run down so I plugged in the AC adapter for charging and decided I'd return to it a short time later. When I resumed my troubleshooting,  I connected the laptop via wi-fi access point to my network and noticed that the internal NIC card was now connected as well.  I wasn’t going to question why it was suddenly working so I unplugged the laptop (so it was now running on batteries) and walked it down to my friend, whose office is on our school campus. I plugged it back into the wired network and, once again, the NIC was disabled.  I started digging through ALL the settings I could find.  It turns out there was a separate control panel for the internal NIC.  When I explored it, I discovered an obscure checkbox.  It was for an option to disable the Internal NIC when the laptop was running on batteries.  What?  I couldn't believe it!  This was clearly a new one for me (though that's not hard to do).  I unchecked this box and exited the control panel.  The NIC was immediately activated and I was good again.

I have been brainstorming on the purpose of such an option since that time.  The only scenario that I see is that Dell is assuming that if you are running on batteries, then you aren't near an AC outlet or within reach of an Ethernet port.  Dell should not make such an assumption. I know many people who are near Ethernet ports but chose to work on batteries until they need to plug into the AC outlet.  While I agree that doing this regularly would, over time,  deplete the total charge available by the battery and that this option COULD be useful in saving battery life, it should NOT be the default.  It's not obvious to most users that running off the battery would disable their NIC.  Dell should either make this checkbox MUCH more obvious to the user or not make it the default option.

Your thoughts?  Feel free to leave comments.

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