Lenovo S12 Broadcom wireless card problems

Pressing Fn + F5 brings up this dialog box

I’ve been having a problem with the wireless card on my Lenovo S12.  The wifi card was working great for over a year, but then one day it just stopped.  The kill switch was working fine:  it worked in Ubuntu and in Windows.  I finally broke down and bought a new card on the internet.  When that didn’t work either, I finally found a note on the internet suggesting that in Windows XP, you can use the <Fn> + F5 keys to bring up a Lenovo Wireless Device Setting dialog box.

This indeed showed that my wireless card status was “Off” and the Status Setting indicator was greyed out.  I clicked on the “Status Setting” icon, and the icon turned green, and the wifi turned on!

After clicking on the icon on the right, it turns green and the wifi turned on

No idea why this worked, or what caused the problem in the first place.

I’ll try to look into how to fix this on my Ubuntu system because I never really boot into my windows partition unless there’s some sort of problem like this.