Note: This blog post is from 2007. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

Called the "wi-fi catcher", it's that switch on the left side (on my unit), which I knew could be used to turn the wireless adapter off or on. But if you pull it toward you, that enables this "wi-fi catcher".

Cooler still, and to the point above, it turns out that this feature works even when the laptop is turned off (or in standby or hibernate). One thing, though: you need to enabled this feature using the Dell QuickSet mechanism (one of your icons in the system tray).

You can learn more about the wi-fi catcher, in this case about the d620, at:

https://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/latd620/en/UG/wireless.htm#wp1138019

Here's a screenshot of the switch:

And an explanation of that screenshot is here, including an explanation of the colors you'll see and what they mean.

Finally, I'll point that I first read of this feature myself at this review:

http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=2846&laptop=Dell+Latitude+D620+Review

Sure, we should all read our owner's manuals, but at a minimum, sometimes you learn more from someone's distilled review. :-)

Note: This blog post is from 2007. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

Some may know the available FileName attribute, which allows you to save the output to a file. This NAME attribute is simply an interesting alternative.

Here's a quick example:

This creates a variable named test. How would you output it? CFCONTENT, of course, with the appropriate content type. If your page has created any other output, don't forget the Reset attribute as well:

To output a Flashpaper format report, use a CFCONTENT type of "application/x-shockwave-flash", and for a CFREPORT Excel spreadsheet, use a CFCONTENT type of "application/vnd.ms-excel".

Why might you do this?

Of course, if you just did that above, you might as well not have bothered, right? The point is that you may do something between when you create the variable and when you output it. For one thing, you may create it in one CFC, custom tag, or CFFUNCTION-based UDF and then output it later in the request.

More likely, you may choose this approach to facilitate caching and later reusing the generated output. Just as with creating a variable with any tag, you could have instead provided a prefix scope like session, application, or server. Then you could manage that cached result any of the many ways that have long existed for caching other tag results in shared scope variables.