7 Ways to Fix a Computer That Can't Find or Connect to Wifi (Windows 10 Laptops & Desktops)

hi everyone josh here and you're watching this video because your windows 10 laptop or desktop can't connect to the wi-fi this video is for anyone who can't see their wireless icon on their desktop at all can't see any wireless networks when they go to connect or are having trouble connecting to a wireless network that another device is able to connect to regardless of your issue i'm going to cover every single tip i have been able to find to help you fix your wi-fi connection if you're having a wi-fi connection problem this video will solve it if you stay through till the end now buckle up because this video will include seven fixes and i'm gonna go through them in the order that i think you should try the fixes in to give you the best odds for fixing your problem as quickly as possible if one fix doesn't work simply move on to the next one and try that and so on and so forth by the time you get to the end i'm confident that you will have your wi-fi problem fixed and you will be able to connect to the wireless network that you're trying to connect to if one of these fixes helps you be sure to tell us which one it was in the comments below so that you can help out the rest of the community not being able to connect to wi-fi is an extremely common problem and it's bound to affect everyone at some point or another especially if something about your device has changed or your network has changed don't worry if you're not tech savvy i'm going to walk you through every step of the process and one of these fixes will help you all right let's get started before we move on to the first fix i want to cover a couple of things that i don't consider fixes but nonetheless they need to be mentioned because many many people have had the issue before where they simply didn't check that something was working on their laptop and they spent a long time trying to diagnose a problem that wasn't really a problem okay the first thing you want to do before you do anything else is if you're using a laptop make sure that the wi-fi button is pressed on your laptop make sure that it is actually enabled with the button if you have one on your laptop not every laptop has an actual physical button but i know for a fact that many people have had an issue where they simply did not press the wi-fi button and they couldn't figure out why their wi-fi wasn't able to connect the second thing is to make sure that you don't have airplane mode on whether you're on a laptop or a desktop if you're connecting to your internet wirelessly you will have an airplane mode option available so click down on the bottom right hand corner where your network connection is and it'll open up a menu down at the bottom you'll see three tabs wi-fi airplane mode and mobile hotspot number one make sure that wi-fi is on whether you have a physical button or whether it is here in windows make sure the wi-fi is on you can see that here it is blue the second thing is to make sure that airplane mode is off airplane mode should be gray in windows 10 if it is off if it is on you will see that it is blue and your wireless connections will disappear so make sure that airplane mode is turned off and that your wi-fi is turned on now note if you don't see the wi-fi icon at all down on the bottom right corner the first fix that we're about to go over will likely fix that problem generally i would say it's also a good idea to go ahead and restart your computer and maybe even restart your router or modem to make sure that that isn't the issue with that said you don't have to do that to get started and you can proceed with the first fix okay the first thing we're going to do is actually verify that the wi-fi adapter is turned on and that the system sees it and that it is available to use so what we're going to do is go to our device manager simply right-click on the windows logo and go to device manager from here you're going to navigate to the network adapter now when you open up the network adapter list for the first time you're going to see quite a few listings here we only need to worry about one and that is the wi-fi adapter most of the time you can tell which one of these is your wi-fi adapter because it will say wi-fi somewhere in the title you don't want to have anything that says ethernet or any sort of a wan mini port like you can see here i see mine is listed as the intel wi-fi 6 ax 200 160 megahertz now what you're going to do is right click on this wi-fi adapter and you're going to click on uninstall device importantly you do not want to delete the driver software from this device so leave that option unchecked and just click install after a second you'll see that the device has disappeared from your list but don't worry what we're going to do is go up to action and then scan for hardware changes you can see here that actually the wi-fi adapter has popped back up in this list and it didn't even notify me that it was going to happen that's because windows 10 already had the driver and it installed it quickly in the background you can see here that the wi-fi six driver is back under network adapters if you couldn't see your wi-fi icon in the bottom right hand corner before check and see if you can see it now because it should be in place enjoying the content so far is it helpful be sure to click the like button to help me out note that when you uninstall and reinstall this driver your computer will forget all of the networks that you had previously connected to so you're going to have to re-enter in your passwords now if you still can't see the wi-fi icon on the bottom right i'm going to ask you to do one more thing with this driver before we move on go ahead and right click it again this time you're going to click update when you get to this menu you're going to select browse my computer for drivers here you're going to select let me pick from a list of available drivers and you can see here that we have a list of three it doesn't show a date here but your computer may show different dates listed here as well you want to select the newest driver if you don't have dates listed you can simply choose one driver at a time and see if one of these works to install it simply click next and it'll tell you when it's finished installing at this point you should see the wi-fi icon on the bottom right of your corner on the taskbar now hopefully that fixed your problem if it didn't hopefully you can at least see the wi-fi icon on the bottom right side the second fix is restoring the advanced settings in your internet options for this we're going to go to the search bar and type internet options that's going to bring up a control panel listing here and it says internet properties we're going to go to the advanced tab and we're going to click on restore advanced settings click apply and hit ok you may need to restart your computer at this point to see if it's worked if you're still having trouble let's move on to the third fix here we're going to run the network troubleshooter built into windows 10. for this we're going to go to settings type in settings into the search bar now we're going to go to network and internet here you'll see that i'm not connected to the internet and that's because i've reset my settings and it's forgotten the network that i was originally connected to but if you're having an issue where you aren't able to connect to the wi-fi simply hit the troubleshoot button and it's going to detect any problems that it sees with your network settings or your hardware once you get to this screen go ahead and select all network adapters it's going to start the diagnostic and since there's nothing wrong with my hardware and i simply need to choose a connection it's just telling me to make that choice now in your case it may give you a different fix that it recommends in which case you would simply apply that fix and select ok make sure that you choose the option to try these repairs as an administrator to make sure that you don't have any issues now if you still can't connect to the internet the fourth fix is to reset all of your network settings completely for this fix you're going to stay in the network options that we were in just a minute ago and this time you're going to click on network reset this network reset is going to let windows uninstall and reinstall drivers disable and re-enable services and basically do everything it can on the back end to reset your computer back to the original network settings once you click the button it'll ask you if you're sure and when you click yes it's going to tell you to wait a few minutes while it works in the background and then it'll restart your pc since i don't need to reset my connection i'm going to skip that now but you'll need to make sure that you let the process finish and that you let your computer restart as well if you'd rather wait on this step so you don't have to restart your computer you can skip it for now and go to the next three steps and if those don't work you can come back to the network reset and go ahead and go through the process and restart your computer now let's go to step five for the next two steps we're going to be doing some work inside the task manager in windows services it can look a little bit scary at first but as long as you follow my instructions there won't be anything to mess up just make sure that you follow along closely so fix five we're gonna restart the windows explorer open up your taskbar by typing control alt delete and clicking into the task manager from here you want to scroll all the way down till you get to the bottom and you're going to see something called windows explorer with a little file icon to the right of it what you're going to do here is simply right click it and you're going to click restart you can see my computer freaked out for just a second there but it's just done a quick restart on the windows explorer process and now at this point you can check and see if your wireless connections are working if it's still not working we're going to move on to the sixth fix the sixth fix the fifth the sixth fifth if it's still not working we're gonna move on to the sixth fix for that we're gonna stay in the task manager but we're gonna move over to services you're going to see a big list of stuff here don't worry about it you're going to click on the bottom where it says open services this brings up another window where we can see the same services that we were looking at before but now we have an opportunity to change and make edits first thing we're going to look for is the dhcp client while that doesn't have anything directly to do with the wi-fi it does have to do with the way windows 10 connects to the internet in general we want to make sure that that's running if you look here under status you should see running if it says stopped or disabled you want to right click on it and select properties make sure the startup type is set to automatic and then select start and hit apply and ok the next thing you're going to check out is the wlan auto config this is another service that should be running in order for you to be able to connect to the internet and if it says that it's stopped or disabled under status you're going to right click again go to properties make sure the startup type is set to automatic and then select start and ok the next one we're going to check is the wi-fi direct services connection as you can see under mine it's actually there's actually nothing listed under status and it says the startup type is manual that's okay it doesn't have to be running right now but we want to make sure that we select this one right click go to properties and we select startup type manual and then we hit ok at this point i hope that your wi-fi is working but if not we have one more fix we're going to move on to fix number seven this fix actually takes place within the network connections list that you have when you open your wireless connections on the bottom right so we're going to open this list and if you have a network that you've previously connected to but you aren't able to connect to it now maybe also your computer looks like it's trying to connect to a network but it's not giving you an internet connection and it just isn't working in this case you're going to open up the network connection list and the network connection that you're trying to connect to i want you to right click it and select forget this will basically make your computer forget that you've ever connected to this particular network and it'll erase any saved password that you have for this network then you can connect to it again as if it was the first time you'll put in your password and connect just like you normally would at this point i hope that your wireless connection is working just fine and you've been able to connect to the wireless network with your computer or laptop hopefully you were able to do that many steps ago if you're still here i do want to invite you again to like the video if it helped you and to consider subscribing to the channel for more information about how to fix common computer issues how to's and other information that you might find helpful if you're still having issues be sure to drop a comment below and i will respond to it and try to help you out with any other issues that you may be having and maybe even make a video about it in the future

Channel: Ask A Computer Geek

Views: 76,531

Keywords: computer can't connect to wifi, computer can't find wifi, laptop can't find wifi, laptop can't connect to wifi, desktop can't find wifi, desktop can't connect to wifi, computer can't connec to wifi but phone can, wifi icon missing from taskbar, wifi not working on my laptop, windows 10 can't find wifi, windows 10 can't connect to wifi, wifi connection problems windows 10, laptop wifi problems, how to fix wifi connection, how to fix can't find wifi, how to fix windows 10 wifi

Id: LPxxvGOkElg

Length: 11min 39sec (699 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 16 2021