hp wireless button changes airplane mode

I have a solution that does not require you to unplug your battery and is a little faster. This may seem like a long process but it's actually very quick once you get used to it.. it's basically just clicking through the right options.

Open control panel and go to Network and Sharing Center.

Go to Change your network settings and choose Troubleshoot Problems.

On the page that opens, choosing the first option, Internet Connections. Click Nect on the window that opens.

It will give you a window with two more options, choose Troubleshoot my connection to the Internet.

It will now look for and detect the problem that you need to "Turn on Wireless capability" Choose the option, Apply this fix. This will reconnect your connection so you can use wireless again.

 I came across this message base because I to am looking for a better solution to the problem. I realized, my solution was faster than everyone who posted above me and wanted to share it. We really do need a way to turn off this airplane mode function for good
 and restore our function keys to normal PC functioning.

Already did BIOS upgrade to F22.  I will try removing HP Power Manager and let you all know.

I am not running any of the HP bundled software aside from the wireless button driver, hp simple pass for finger print login and 3D Driveguard (that's some sort of hdd protection utility). If you believe HP power manager is causing the problem, you can try removing it. See what happens, windows 7 and 8 both have decent power management solutions so I don't see much reason to have something on top of that.

You can also try updating your BIOS to the latest version. I did update mine today, but before I did the hard reset it did not resolve the issue.

If I do exactly what you describe, it works.  Soon as I put the battery back in it goes back to non-functional.  Almost seems like HP Power Manager might be part of the problem.  If I go to Device Manager, right click on Ralink wifi device, Properties... Power Management it shows "Let Windows Shut This Down To Save Power" and it is CHECKED.  I unchecked it.  No difference.

Apparently my DV7-7047cl is different from your model.

I have not tried just leaving the battery out but might do that just to see what happens on several subsequent boots.

If I have to do your BIOS routine every time I start, that is ridiculous.  I am thinking about Toshiba or another brand for the future.  Not happy with HP and over a month of no action from them on this.

Hmmm, oddly enough, the hard reset did resolve the issue for me (I am running HP Pavilion dv7-6b75). The problem was as described above, and I went to hp support forums and looked up the posts over there, specifically this thread.

I followed these steps:

1. remove battery and unplug power supply
2. press and hold power on button for 30 seconds
3. leave battery out but plug power supply back in 
4. press power on button and then tap on the f10 key immediately (a number of times) (I did have to hit escape here instead and get into BIOS, but this is specific model dependent I guess)
5. the bios setup menu appears
6. select reset defaults (load default values)
7. select save and exit

After this the button lit up orange at the immediately after boot but turned white when I got to windows 8 interface, and from there on things looked tip top.

The solution did not work though, when I did not go to BIOS to reset the default values and just booted up.

Hope this helps, happy holidays everyone.