A friend of mine uses Vista on his laptop (not sure what it is, just that it isn't a Mac) and convinced me that it might be worth putting Vista onto my MBP via BootCamp (I crumbled because Vista is shiny, and has a black menu bar. I had to put Windows on it, and I had a free (legit) copy of Vista.

In case this was changed by later versions, I was using BootCamp 1.3, with associated driver CD.

I booted up into Vista and found that Airport and Bluetooth were on. I was at uni in a lecture and didn't want to waste battery whilst using a windows-only copy of a program (And also because I wanted to see what this whole "Aero Glass" thing was like. I had by backlight almost all the way down, and I looked for a way to turn off my wireless devices. I could do everything except turn them off. So I turned to my friend and asked him "You're the Vista expert here, how do I turn off Bluetooth and Wireless?" To which he replied "Don't you have a switch somewhere on your laptop for those things?"

I just looked at him blankly. I can appreciate that Windows would be lagging behind OS X by a certain degree... but not by that much. Somehow my friend could not comprehend that software could and should be able to power down devices. He just took it as given that your computer should be riddled with switches that will wear and tear, simply because the OS cannot cope with turning those things off by itself.

I like to think that my MBP is designed very well and aside from a pixel seeming to be stuck on purple or something, I like to think that it is not missing any functionality.

I can't remember anymore why I posted this. Just pissed off with Vista I suppose. I reverted to XP... in Parallels, and removed all dual-boot functionality from my MBP... it's just a waste of battery.

You can turn it off the hard way via device manager i'm sure. There is a way to do it in XP, so there's definitely a way to do it in Vista. I just cbf working out/learning how.

ooohhh... like the new avatar Disko!

You should be able to disable the wireless device using the device manager.

I haven't got a copy of vista at hand to give you step by step, but in XP you simply right click the wireless device and choose disable to turn it off.

Wireless can be turned off yes. Bluetooth is another story entirely.

I can't get the damn things to switch off in XP on Bootcamp - so I just set the wireless to be disabled (Control Panel/Network Connections, right-click Wireless Adaptor - Disable) and set the Bluetooth to not be discoverable.

Or as others have suggested, you can use device manager to disable Bluetooth... fun fun fun...

so this is another attempt by someone from the mac community to feel all high and mighty about something their mac OS X can do that windows vista cant?

to disable your network devices in vista all you have to do is go to the network and sharing centre, go to 'manage network connections' then right click whatever connection you want disabled and click disable. is that so difficult?

Not difficult I'd imagine.

Whether it's logical is another thing entirely

I would have suggested looking into Vista's online help though.

sanjay, that approach does not (in most cases) remove power from the circuitry involved, it merely tells Windows not to bother trying to access it. The wifi and bluetooth transceivers are still radiating and consuming precious battery power.

Traditional x86 BIOS does not give many devices software control over power, and as far as Windows (all versions) and most linux builds are concerned, wifi and bluetooth are classed as removable devices. This is why there are switches for them on most generic-PC laptops. You 'insert' them by flicking the switch on, 'eject' or unplug them by switching them off.

Apple's use of EFI and a smarter SMC subsystem gives MacOS the ability to control almost every facet of the hardware, just one of the many benefits of keeping the hardware platform closed. Apple have not, as yet, bothered to add Windows drivers for all of the SMC features. Perhaps they will appear in Boot Camp 10.5, perhaps they never will due to some oddball limitation of windows.


Brains