Teacher + School >>> Laptop + Home - Connectivity Issues.

[Jayce]

I think we may have found it, and it was a learning experience for me.

Dell has that ridiculous feature which disables the NIC after the battery is depleted to a certain point. I disabled that feature and suddenly in device manager, the network adapter popped back up.

She's back online at the school, and I instructed her to take it home and see how it goes. I'll report back as to whether or not it worked.

Some notes:

DHCP enabled.
Firewall is off.
Wireless is disabled. (all we're dealing with in both scenarios is wired connectivity)

 

[Jorsoft]

Never heard of that "feature" before!!! Might be something they put in their business/education models, I guess. Was it software or BIOS feature? Dell and their whacky BIOS' I swear!

 

[Jayce]

It was software. If you go to control panel and list as classic view, you see it right away. Internet Configuration blah blah or some BS. You click there and there's two options. "Always activate" and something else... I hit always activate.

*shrug* we'll see if that works.