[NCLUG] WIFI and Bluetooth hard blocks

[rww]

Stephen, I agree that this is a driver problem.  After all, Win7 and its 
associated drivers DO work.

However, I do not think that the problem lies with the linux WIFI drivers.
- Non MSI GE70 users aren't reporting strange hard block problems
- Both the iwlwifi and ath9k drivers exhibit the exact same behavior
- When the hard block is removed by removing battery, both of these 
drivers work**
- Rfkill is not able to remove the hard block

**The ath9k driver has other problems.  Wifi is flakey -- it disconnects 
every minute or so...

Other MSI laptops have a kernel module, msi_wmi, to interface the msi 
"hotkeys" and the hardware.  This doesn't work for me.  When I try to 
load msi_wmi, I get the error message:

FATAL: Error inserting msi_wmi 
(/lib/modules/3.4.28-2.20-desktop/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/msi-wmi.ko): 
No such device

Looking in /var/log/messages, I find the following:

Mar 2 08:55:41 linux-p5tw kernel: [ 2137.447772] msi_wmi: This machine 
doesn't have MSI-hotkeys through WMI

There is an experiment that I have not performed that might yield some 
insight.  Load the Win7 drivers via ndiswrapper and see if the hard 
block goes away.   If the hard block does go away,  problem solved.  But 
ndiswrapper does not support WPA encryption.  To regain this security, I 
would unload ndiswrapper and reload the linux driver hoping the hard 
block remains off.