Windows 10: Show airplane mode switch on wifi menu on desktop computer

I understand what you want, but as you will have realised, finding it- if it exists as such- is somewhat of a guessing game and as such, you'd have to be very lucky.

So I've given you what I can readily discover, which may allow you control of the feature- for example, by writing a vbs script or similar.

Bear in mind the detection of whether the PC is a desktop or laptop may simply be in the code, resulting in the appropriate GUI elements being exposed - i.e. not in the registry. No doubt somewhere in MS it's documented.. but...

Basically if a desktop PC has registry entries corresponding to those in a laptop for 'Flight Mode'/'Airplane Mode' and hte state of those is what's disabling your Wifi, the above may give you a solution.

But bear in mind there is also a Wifi tile on the Action Centre whose state also controls the Wifi. Confusing! That's one of the commands I gave earlier, and will correspond to different registry entries.

So you may need both... unless you have access to that tile (labelled 'WiFi') on a desktop.

 

well it just occured to me to search the registry for 'flight', and I came across one called "isflighted"
and one called "IFlightSettingsAPIBroker" and one called "isFlightingRing"

ooh, here's one called "isFlightReady". And it is set to 1 on my laptop. And a folder called "Flighted Features" with a key called "ComponentUIforWinRTpicker" also set to 1.

I'll check if these are set to 0 on my desktop....

These keys are all in HKEY_LOCALMACHINE/SOFTWARE/WOW6432Node

I don't have world of warcraft installed.....

Okay, searching on this registry key, I found out 'flighting' seems to be an MS term for pushing beta builds or something like that. Total red herring.

This is all way more work than it's worth..... but now I'm on a mission *Smile

 

okay, searching for airplane turns up a key called Driver Desc with a value of "Airplane Mode Switch" and a key called DriverDesc with a value of "Airplane Mode Switch Collection" Don't see anything like a switch setting of 1 or 0. I see "Dell" shown in key names on these pages, so it looks like driver files for the wireless.

They are nested deep inside a lot of folders in ControlSet001 inside local machine/SYSTEM (wish I could just copy the path)

Obviously don't want to mess with driver keys. Although I think my desktop wifi is a miniPCI, so could be installed in a laptop, it just isn't. But if the switch visibility is being controlled from the wifi driver rather than by windows, that sounds like a deal-breaker to me. Not just a simple flag somewhere.....

 

Yeah, I'm going to give it a rest and just put a shortcut to the adapter on my desktop like I've always done. I was so excited, because until recently the only way to do airplane mode was with a hardware switch. It was so cool to see it show up in the OS in win8.