hp wireless button changes airplane mode

has someone figured out the solution?

I did exactly the same thing with my hp laptop:

First i thought it was the problem with the button - got a driver for it, but the damn wireless still greyed out and the button switches between airplane mode only.

Wireless devices both Wifi and Bluetooth greyed out

I have searched all over the net for weeks now and no solution.  I have talked to HP support which only gets lame answers, although they are very professional about it.  LOL.  I was sent a new Ralink card and of course, no difference.  One rep suggested I send the laptop in to them.  I refused.  An. other told me to roll back to Win 7 so he could verify that Win 8 is the problem.  I laughed and told him, "you roll back your laptop."  I had one rep agree with me that the problem is BIOS.  He said he would move the ticket up to a higher level.  It seems like HP reps have no knowledge of this problem and are unaware of the hundreds of posts regarding this issue.

After trying every solution I have found, still no wireless button. I am running off hard wired ethernet and can plug in my iPhone in USB and hot spot.  But this is a real work around that HP needs to fix.

I am almost certain it is BIOS.  The other drivers seem to function for the wireless card and button, but the button is not functioning in the manner of its design.

Good luck folks and Happy New Year.  Maybe we will have this solved soon, HP...are you listening?

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.

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.

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.