Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo L7310GW

Ali, my wife, picked up an Amilo L7310GW laptop computer (from www.fujitsu-siemens.com) for me today at the local supermarket. The Irish supermarkets are all trying to sell computers recently.

I was becoming tired of hiding in the 'office' (4th bedroom) with the desktop and not having the mobility despite having configured the whole house with a wireless network - including 2 original xboxs and a 360)

Imagine my frustration when I found the laptop could do everything except talk to the wireless network. It just refused to see anything. It got worse when I went surfing the web and discovered others with a similar problem.

Even some review sites downgraded their scores because of difficulty in getting the wifi to work. One even suggested ignoring the internal wifi, and buying a separate pcmcia card instead.

And then I came across a forum where one person noticed that the wireless network activated if he sent his laptop into hibernation and then woke it again.

Another site mentioned a hot key that enabled and disabled the wifi connectivity on a different model of Amilo.

And then I saw the light! The fn + F1 combination enabled and disabled the wifi. A simple 2 button key press and my network popped up. So easy ... when one knows how.

Fujitsu-Siemens need to improve the documentation on this - including on their website. Soem of the most popular documentation on the site was on configuring the wifi but none of it clearly showed this on/off status for the wireless internals.

So after several hours of messing about, and worrying about returning the laptop, I can relax again and start to transfer my documents across to my new found mobility.