Disable SD/SDIO Card?

@thenzero has very much guided me through a working wifi connection Sig3/Spectec SDIO. He was a patient hero

Now that I'm on-line and wanting to preserve battery life, I'm looking for something such as DevPSwitch.exe to disable/reenable the SDIO (DevPSwitch can only disable cf/pcmcia wifi)

Through Aegis Client, a user can disable the SDIO radio but the card blinks on. Nor can I find any cmd commands that work with Aegis's exe, and I'd rather not keep ejecting the card from the Sig3's aging plastic.

Jake

I know it’s clunky and perhaps vaguely annoying but maybe you can just move the driver dll out of /windows when you’re not using it?

I know that’s not ideal and hopefully someone comes up with a better idea.

That won't really work for what he's wanting. He wants to be able to disable and reenable at will without removing. Once the card is loaded you can't do anything to that DLL.

A few further thoughts on this-

1. There is mention of a PPC2003 "wlan utility" app in the Spectec manual and the screenshots clearly show a toggle for the radio as well as a power mode selection list
2. This is interesting because there is a registry key for our cards that is "PowerMode" and it is set to "2" by default. "2" in that screenshot is the "fast" mode. I am going to go out on a limb and guess that "0" is disabled, and "1" is power saving mode.

So, I think you should experiment with setting "PowerMode" to 1 and see if you get a radio shut off when not in use. It is at HKLM->comm->WLAN11g1->Parms->PowerMode

Additionally I think it is worth noting that you don't actually need to remove the card, just push it in gently and release to disengage (and repeat to re-engage) so I don't think there's actually much risk to the sig....just a thought.

Going on to what you said about the wlan utility:
I wonder if there was a .net compact framework program maybe on xda or somewhere else that someone made for something like this. May be worth a check if you can’t locate that official one.

Again I could be wrong I’m just thinking of ideas

@torch thanks. I suppose one could make a batch file that would rename the dll back and forth, though each time would require a soft reset

@thenzero thank you the reg tip. I did find that setting, and set it to 1. A reset didn't affect connectivity, but the card stays on-line (so far). Tho it may at least be in a power-saving state, but that's not clear.

Just for a look-see, I also put the setting to 0, which has seemingly little effect as well.

One thing I have noticed is that if Zero Config is disabled in Aegis Client, a reset disables the card completely until Aegis is started manually.

Jake

Not a bad thought. The manual indicates that the wlan utility is only for the wlan11b cards, but I suppose it can't hurt to try it out and see if it might work with the wlan11g card, although I am not holding my breath!

so....problem solved?

Plus you could also see if the wlan11b utility has some registry calls that could apply to the wlan11g as well.

@thenzero I'm trying to avoid a reset, as you'd have to shut down programs, etc and then restart them.

It does seem odd that the sd slot itself can't be disabled, tho maybe there's never been a need to do so.

Jake

what about a suspend?

You could run the Sig on battery and when it pops up with “do you want to run the slot on battery power”, click no?
Or am I misunderstanding and the sdio slot doesn’t work with that as opposed to the normal cf card way?
You know the battery saving option that pops up on Windows CE when you’re running on battery and it gives you a chance to disable the card upon waking up

Yeah. No go with the wlan utility, it just complains that it "Can't open control channel!" and then crashes unceremoniously

@torch good idea. I just went through smalltweak and its card battery warnings do not apply to sd cards. Not a surprise, really, given that the program was developed long before sd/pda use.

Jake

@thenzero thanks for putting it through its paces.

Jake

I assume the Windows CE OS is the same ?