Intell 5300, Blinking Wifi Light!

[tilhasbb]

Hello,

Ever since I installed the 5300 the wifi light on my XPS M1330 keeps flashing whenever there is a file transfer. Its very annoying! (If you have bittorent on the thing stays flashing, like its having a seizure)

How do you disable the thing?

Windows 7 has 12.1.0.14
I upgraded to 12.2.0.11

Same thing
Any ideas?

 

[thiggins]

I know of no adapter that allows you to disable the activity light.

Didn't your previous adapter also flash the activity light?

 

[tilhasbb]

My Intel 4965AGN did not have this light flashing like this.

It was ON, till i turned off wireless/bt using the wireless button on the M1330.
NEVER EVER did it flash...

This bright blue flashing is the most distracting thing ever. I might go back to the 4965 if i cant fix it.

 

[thiggins]

Intel must have changed the behavior of the light from just a status (on) light to wireless activity indicator.

Either switch back, or put tape over it.

 

[ynohtna]

blinks on my x200t as well with the 5300agn but the light green is not bad and not really as annoying I guess! Definitely an activity light... no transfers, it stays solid.

 

[aidil]

Hello,

Ever since I installed the 5300 the wifi light on my XPS M1330 keeps flashing whenever there is a file transfer. Its very annoying! (If you have bittorent on the thing stays flashing, like its having a seizure)

How do you disable the thing?

Windows 7 has 12.1.0.14
I upgraded to 12.2.0.11

Same thing
Any ideas?

Hey there... This is my first post here.

Which form factor of the card did you get, the full-height or the half-height one?

I've also experienced this blinking WiFi light after replacing stock Dell 1510 Wireless-N card in my Dell Studio 17 with Intel WiFi Link 5300 that I bought from ebay.

Turns out that this card is an Engineering Sample and it's actually clearly printed on its label and also on the seller's page. I didn't see it upon receiving it and even when I was installing it.

For few weeks I could just use this card as having a kind of activity light for WiFi was a cool thing until I experienced few bad connections to my WRT310N wireless router. The symptom was although it could establish connection to the wireless router but no network activities could be performed.

Then I did some searching on ebay and able to find the non-ES version of this 5300 card. I bought it to replace the ES version, and voilà...!!! No more blinking WiFi light and also no more hangs on the connections.

So far on ebay I've seen many ES version of Intel WiFi Link 5300 cards in the full-height form factor, while more and more sellers have 'the real version' in half-height form factor cards as they are Dell parts.

And also watch for fake labeling as being told by few 'honest ' sellers that this kind of practice is being done by many other sellers as the full-height non-ES version of Intel WiFi Link 5300 card is hard to get.

 

[claykin]

Install the latest drivers from http://support.intel.com. V12.4.0 drivers were released on 4/9.

 

[jjcrandall]

I have a Lenovo t61 with the 4965N and a T500 Lenovo with the 5300AGN, and they both flash when you are in a heavy file transfer. At first I thought it was signal loss, but it happens all the time during above-light usage.

The 12.4 drivers exibit the same behavior as well. Don't use that excuse to not upgrade though. the 12.4 seem to be a much better behaved driver than the 12.2 or earlier versions.

 

[nitehawke]

Blinking Wifi LED FIXED!

FYI: I just figured out how to fix the flashing LED issue. On a number of forums, others have been able to stop the flashing in other operating systems because it is a SOFTWARE configuration.

The fix for Windows requires going into the registry and correcting a value named LedMode.

Navigate to the following registry key:
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class

There are two more key structures you have to nagivate thru, but they are unique to each computer you have to search for them:

The additional navigation required is:
%GUID FOR YOR NETWORK%\%NIC#%

Since the GUID and NIC# will be unique on every computer, you will need to navigate to the Class key, and then perform a search based on the model name of your wireless NIC (i.e.: when you go to Network Connections, Windows will have some model name associated with your adapter).

Windows identifies my WiFi NIC model as a 'Intel(R) WiFi Link 5300 AGN' so I performed a search for 'Intel(R) WiFi Link'. Hopefully you get the idea.

You will know you've found ther right key if you see a large number of registry values, including 'AdapterModel', 'DriverDesc', 'DriverVersion', etc.

See the attached picture.

Once you've found the right key for your wireless NIC, start looking for the value: 'LedMode'
LedMode is a 32-bit DWORD value. There are three settings that I know of:

0 = LED is ALWAYS OFF
1 = LED is ON and BLINKS during activity
2 = LED is ON (constantly)

As you can probably guess now--the data you expect to see for the LedMode value is '1' (decimal).

Set the LedMode DWORD value to '2'

Disable your WiFi adapter, and re-enable it and volla! No more blinking LED!

Enjoy!
Nitehawke

FYI: I'm running Windows 7 (x64), but in principle this should work on Vista/XP as well.

 

[imnotminkus]

nitehawke, I love you. that little light was driving me crazy.

It was slightly different for my Lenovo G550 with 7 pro 64bit and a Broadcom card, so I'll stick that here in case anyone finds it helpful:

The registry keys were here:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E972-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\0011

I changed LedBlinkFast from -1 to 0 and that stopped the blinking with activity. The other keys are:

----dunno what these do----
ledbh0 -1
ledbh1 -1
ledbh2 -1

activity:
ledblinkfast -1

connecting:
ledblinkmed -1

on/off?:
ledblinkslow -1

----also don't know----
leddc 0


I've attached a screenshot of the relevant registry keys.