Win10 laptop, suddenly unable to see the wi-fi it's been using for ages.
October 14, 2019 5:37 AM Subscribe
Love to hear any clever network troubleshooting suggestions you folks may have. Deeply annoying details inside.
So I've got Verizon/FiOS. Last night I let my iPad try to download an OS update, but it crapped out midway, saying there was no internet connection. Around the same time, the TV that's connected to the same wi-fi through a Roku also said 'whoops, no internet'. I checked my PC, which has a wired connection, and it was on the internet and everything was fine. So I cussingly re-entered my wi-fi password into the Roku, and restarted the iPad, and everything worked as before--or so I thought.
This morning my wife reports that her Windows 10 laptop can't see the wi-fi network. Our home network now doesn't appear on its list of available networks, though it can see all our neighbors' networks and will cheerfully connect to most of them. I've turned airplane mode on and off to try and get it to reconsider, but no. Went into the list of known networks and told it to forget our network, which didn't help. Then told it to connect to a 'hidden network' and gave it both the name and password of our home network; still no love. Based on an online list of things to try, I also used the command line to reset TCP/IP--'netsh int ip reset' from an admin command prompt. I'm a little out of my depth doing that, but it seemed unlikely to break anything that wasn't already broken. It also didn't fix anything.
I haven't restarted the modem/router. I haven't had to do that since we got FiOS, and honestly I hesitate to do it for fear of making something ELSE not work; I need my PC to be on the internet for professional reasons. And I'm no networking expert, but I tend to think that if you have five devices that work and one that doesn't, you probably shouldn't screw around with the ones that work. All that being said, I am prepared to humbly receive your wisdom. Thanks in advance.
So I've got Verizon/FiOS. Last night I let my iPad try to download an OS update, but it crapped out midway, saying there was no internet connection. Around the same time, the TV that's connected to the same wi-fi through a Roku also said 'whoops, no internet'. I checked my PC, which has a wired connection, and it was on the internet and everything was fine. So I cussingly re-entered my wi-fi password into the Roku, and restarted the iPad, and everything worked as before--or so I thought.
This morning my wife reports that her Windows 10 laptop can't see the wi-fi network. Our home network now doesn't appear on its list of available networks, though it can see all our neighbors' networks and will cheerfully connect to most of them. I've turned airplane mode on and off to try and get it to reconsider, but no. Went into the list of known networks and told it to forget our network, which didn't help. Then told it to connect to a 'hidden network' and gave it both the name and password of our home network; still no love. Based on an online list of things to try, I also used the command line to reset TCP/IP--'netsh int ip reset' from an admin command prompt. I'm a little out of my depth doing that, but it seemed unlikely to break anything that wasn't already broken. It also didn't fix anything.
I haven't restarted the modem/router. I haven't had to do that since we got FiOS, and honestly I hesitate to do it for fear of making something ELSE not work; I need my PC to be on the internet for professional reasons. And I'm no networking expert, but I tend to think that if you have five devices that work and one that doesn't, you probably shouldn't screw around with the ones that work. All that being said, I am prepared to humbly receive your wisdom. Thanks in advance.
Best answer: If that modem/router is also your wifi access point, I'd absolutely recommend restarting it. It's entirely possible for the wireless software and/or hardware inside a device like that to fall over without touching the wired side, and quite often when that happens, all that's needed to get it going again is power cycling.
The fact that your devices are still fully capable of achieving working connections to other wireless access points does put the finger squarely on the component in your network that they all have in common - your own wireless access point - as the culprit here. And even if its wireless side has experienced some kind of permanent hardware failure that will mean it needs replacing, the wired side is very unlikely to stop working just because you power cycled it.
That said: I've frequently seen Windows 10's wifi support break for no reason and resist all methods short of full removal of power (deezil's included) to restore it. Turn off fast startup, shut it down, unplug it, pull the battery, try to switch it on so that it sucks the last drop of juice out of its internal power supply; then replace the battery, plug it back in and start it up again.
If that leaves you exactly where you are already, do try restarting the router.
posted by flabdablet at 6:00 AM on October 14, 2019 [2 favorites]
The fact that your devices are still fully capable of achieving working connections to other wireless access points does put the finger squarely on the component in your network that they all have in common - your own wireless access point - as the culprit here. And even if its wireless side has experienced some kind of permanent hardware failure that will mean it needs replacing, the wired side is very unlikely to stop working just because you power cycled it.
That said: I've frequently seen Windows 10's wifi support break for no reason and resist all methods short of full removal of power (deezil's included) to restore it. Turn off fast startup, shut it down, unplug it, pull the battery, try to switch it on so that it sucks the last drop of juice out of its internal power supply; then replace the battery, plug it back in and start it up again.
If that leaves you exactly where you are already, do try restarting the router.
posted by flabdablet at 6:00 AM on October 14, 2019 [2 favorites]
Restarting the router is the first thing you should do and it's going to be what Verizon tells you to do first. So restart the router.
posted by jonathanhughes at 6:23 AM on October 14, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by jonathanhughes at 6:23 AM on October 14, 2019 [2 favorites]
Just one more chiming in to say that I have Fios, and I've had exactly the same type of problem with devices (but not all devices) spontaneously disconnecting while others chug along happily, and restarting the router is almost always the quick fix. I used to stress out terribly every time I did this for fear that the Internet connection wouldn't come back up properly, but it has never, ever been an issue. These days I don't hesitate to pop the router off and back on any time the Wi-Fi looks at me wrong.
posted by Mothlight at 8:24 AM on October 14, 2019
posted by Mothlight at 8:24 AM on October 14, 2019
Something else you might want to check: in my experience, people who declare themselves not to be networking experts tend to be a little too willing to take bad advice from others who are keen to be seen as such. Did some such person, by any chance, persuade you at some point that you could improve your wifi security by turning on your router's MAC address filtering option, so that you (or more likely your "helpful" friend) need to add new client devices' addresses to a list maintained somewhere in the router's settings before it will talk to them?
Windows 10 has a feature called random hardware addresses, which also gets misrepresented as being a security improvement, and I've seen laptops that have it turned on by default. It doesn't play the least bit nice with router MAC address filtering.
The simple fact is that all you need in order to prevent unauthorized access to your wireless network is a long, randomly-generated WPA2 passphrase. If you have that then you don't need MAC address filtering. And if you don't have that, then neither MAC address filtering nor SSID broadcast suppression will add more than a few seconds to the time it takes a black-hat to break into your network.
posted by flabdablet at 8:45 AM on October 14, 2019
Windows 10 has a feature called random hardware addresses, which also gets misrepresented as being a security improvement, and I've seen laptops that have it turned on by default. It doesn't play the least bit nice with router MAC address filtering.
The simple fact is that all you need in order to prevent unauthorized access to your wireless network is a long, randomly-generated WPA2 passphrase. If you have that then you don't need MAC address filtering. And if you don't have that, then neither MAC address filtering nor SSID broadcast suppression will add more than a few seconds to the time it takes a black-hat to break into your network.
posted by flabdablet at 8:45 AM on October 14, 2019
I agree with restarting everything; if your modem and router are separate, turn off both and get the modem back up and running before powering the router back on.
How old is your wifi router? If it's older than, oh, 6-7 years, consider replacing it. Those things can eventually lose their minds.
posted by Sunburnt at 9:49 AM on October 14, 2019 [1 favorite]
How old is your wifi router? If it's older than, oh, 6-7 years, consider replacing it. Those things can eventually lose their minds.
posted by Sunburnt at 9:49 AM on October 14, 2019 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: >It's entirely possible for the wireless software and/or hardware inside a device like that to fall over without touching the wired side, and quite often when that happens, all that's needed to get it going again is power cycling.
Yeah, but I had other devices that were using the wi-fi that were working fine...
That said, I probably shouldn't allow myself to develop an irrational fear of restarting the router. I did it, and it seems to have done the trick; I should have just done it to begin with instead of bugging you guys. But I appreciate the moral support. I'm buying everybody a round of donuts. Virtual donuts, no cost (lucky for me) and no taste (sucks to be you). But seriously, thanks...
posted by Sing Or Swim at 3:11 PM on October 14, 2019
Yeah, but I had other devices that were using the wi-fi that were working fine...
That said, I probably shouldn't allow myself to develop an irrational fear of restarting the router. I did it, and it seems to have done the trick; I should have just done it to begin with instead of bugging you guys. But I appreciate the moral support. I'm buying everybody a round of donuts. Virtual donuts, no cost (lucky for me) and no taste (sucks to be you). But seriously, thanks...
posted by Sing Or Swim at 3:11 PM on October 14, 2019
Probably not related, but the other day I took my Win10 lappy to work and it had forgotten all of the wifi networks there, couldn't see them, and didn't know the passwords. The IT guy uninstalled the wifi device driver, downloaded it to a USB drive on another computer, and then installed it back on mine. And then everything worked!
It sounds like your problems might be deeper in your whole home network, but that might be a place to start.
posted by Snowishberlin at 6:27 PM on October 14, 2019
It sounds like your problems might be deeper in your whole home network, but that might be a place to start.
posted by Snowishberlin at 6:27 PM on October 14, 2019
The thing to remember about routers is that what a router actually is is a little computer, and it's running some pretty complex software, and software has bugs.
One class of bug that little computers like routers seem particularly susceptible to is something called a "memory leak", where the system reserves some portion of its internal memory for use by some routine internal task, but doesn't correctly and/or completely un-reserve that portion again once the task is done. The net result is that the system behaves as if had less and less memory installed in it as time goes by, and eventually it behaves as if it had none to spare at all and becomes completely incapable of starting any new task.
One Belkin router I played with once had a setting you could turn on in order to "improve system reliability". I was somewhere between amused and horrified to find out that all that did was force the router to restart itself every 24 hours, presumably in order to reset all the spurious left-over memory reservations that the designers must have seen happening and realized they didn't have time to find and fix before the thing got shipped.
The good news is that although there's another whole class of bugs that cause computers to fail to start up altogether, routers and other little embedded systems are particularly good at not having these. "Have you tried turning it off and on again" has been industry lore for so long that pretty much every small machine on the planet has been built to cope with power being yoinked without warning at any second.
posted by flabdablet at 11:41 PM on October 14, 2019 [1 favorite]
One class of bug that little computers like routers seem particularly susceptible to is something called a "memory leak", where the system reserves some portion of its internal memory for use by some routine internal task, but doesn't correctly and/or completely un-reserve that portion again once the task is done. The net result is that the system behaves as if had less and less memory installed in it as time goes by, and eventually it behaves as if it had none to spare at all and becomes completely incapable of starting any new task.
One Belkin router I played with once had a setting you could turn on in order to "improve system reliability". I was somewhere between amused and horrified to find out that all that did was force the router to restart itself every 24 hours, presumably in order to reset all the spurious left-over memory reservations that the designers must have seen happening and realized they didn't have time to find and fix before the thing got shipped.
The good news is that although there's another whole class of bugs that cause computers to fail to start up altogether, routers and other little embedded systems are particularly good at not having these. "Have you tried turning it off and on again" has been industry lore for so long that pretty much every small machine on the planet has been built to cope with power being yoinked without warning at any second.
posted by flabdablet at 11:41 PM on October 14, 2019 [1 favorite]
I recently purchased a new phone and almost immediately I started having trouble connecting to my home's wifi. My situation sounds really similar to yours - one device is having problems, the rest seem to be doing okay. As you can see from my desperate plea of an AskMefi post, I went at the question from many angles but dismissed the thought that the router was the issue because the other phones/computer were working with the wi-fi fine. I thought it was a problem with my phone because it was the newest tech addition to our house.
Well...it looks like it was probably the router after all. The other phone in the house suddenly started experiencing wi-fi issues two days ago, and then the thermostat stopped receiving wi=fi. I had no idea that those things "go bad" after x number of years. Ours is 7 years old, which is apparently geriatric in router years. We're replacing it today and hope that that will be the end of our issues. Anyway, keep an eye on that router and prepare for the day when it needs to be replaced.
posted by Gray Duck at 8:03 AM on October 15, 2019
Well...it looks like it was probably the router after all. The other phone in the house suddenly started experiencing wi-fi issues two days ago, and then the thermostat stopped receiving wi=fi. I had no idea that those things "go bad" after x number of years. Ours is 7 years old, which is apparently geriatric in router years. We're replacing it today and hope that that will be the end of our issues. Anyway, keep an eye on that router and prepare for the day when it needs to be replaced.
posted by Gray Duck at 8:03 AM on October 15, 2019
This thread is closed to new comments.
Same admin command prompt you used for the ip reset command, but use this command:
netsh wlan delete profile name=* i=*
After that, restart, and after the restart, see if it sees it.
posted by deezil at 5:55 AM on October 14, 2019