Stop blaming the dog for making your Wii turn blue

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Stop blaming the dog for making your Wii turn blue

by PJ Hruschak on Aug 31, 2007 at 12:17 AM

Gamertell Princess Leia WiiMote Cauht

For months I had been blaming my dog - not for that - for turning on my game systems when I wasn’t looking.

I figured she was sniffing around or walking by the consoles and either her nose or her happily waging tail hit one of the easy-to-press power buttons. I hadn’t seen it happen but I knew neither my dog nor gremlins were playing my Xbox 360, PS3 or my Wii. (I’d kicked the gremlins out years ago.)

To power up the Xbox 360, you simply glide your finger over the unlit ring whereas for the PS3 you glide your finger over the small icon above the ready light on top of the console. In offering these easy-to-use, sensitive-to-the-touch power buttons, the PS3 and the Xbox are prone to accidental powerups. It’s not really a big deal but, for an environmentally conscious person, powerups when simply dusting the systems or your dog walking by can be a little annoying (especially when you have to perform a multibutton combo to display each game system on your TV). I blame Apple for making the touch-sensitive power button kewl.

For the Wii, however, the power button is more mechanical and takes a little physical force to press. Sure, you can press the button on any WiiMote to turn on the system but, again, it takes force (although lightly jostling a WiiMote can still activate some buttons and wear out the batteries). So, when I would see the Wii system tray blinking blue, I figured the dog simply was being a bit more nosy than normal.

That was, until I actually witnessed the Wii going from seemingly powered off to glowing blue all on its own, doggie sleeping at least 10 feet away from the consoles. I searched the web and found some claims but I hate rumors and suppositions. So I contacted Nintendo.

Sure enough, when the Wii is in standby mode and you allow it to connect to the web, “it will flash blue when you’ve been sent a notification of new updates.” Big Japanese Brother is watching me and wants to make certain my system conforms. There is not a ghost in my machine.

Nintendo’s Technical Questions site explains it this way:

The disc slot light illuminates briefly when:

The Wii Console is turned on either by hitting the power button or by inserting a game disc.

WiiConnect24 is turned on and you are receiving new data, such as messages. WiiConnect24 has to be turned on and the “Slot Illumination” setting needs to be set to “Dim” or “Bright”
The light does not stay illuminated during gameplay or when using other features of the Wii console.

As for the other two system powering up all on their own, I still blame the dog though I have never witnessed this bit of ecological vandalism. I credit it to annoying hardware design or maybe ol’ Princess Leia simply wants to download some arcade games.