Laptop suddenly decided to no longer connect to the internet. Help?

JustAnotherSaver

My wife is to have some sort of video meeting with her workplace this week and wanted to use the laptop.

We barely use the thing. I only really use it for car diagnostics but the internet has worked perfectly fine on it before.

Fire it up today and in the bottom right by the clock, it's not connected. I keep clicking to connect, it keeps saying it's not connected.

It isn't a signal issue either. The signal was decent in the living room but then i stood direct next to the router to get full bar signal and still no joy. I keep clicking connect, it keeps not connecting.

Any ideas?

Cisco001

Try connecting your phone to home wifi, is there an issue?

Then turn on mobile hotspot on your phone, could you connect your laptop to the phone?

If both work out fine, could it be some setting from router?

BTW, the first thing I do in this situation is unplug the router for a minute and shut down the laptop. Sometime it just heal itself.

JustAnotherSaver

Cisco001 said:

Try connecting your phone to home wifi, is there an issue?

Nope, no issue at all.

Then turn on mobile hotspot on your phone, could you connect your laptop to the phone?

I remember a time when i used to laugh at my parents for being technophobes. I thought i'd never end up like that.

And here we are  :l:lol: Mobile hotspot?

JustAnotherSaver

ok i just searched this mobile hotspot thing and found it's a setting on my iphone so i enabled that and tried to connect to it on the laptop.

It did, but said i had "limited access" or was it limited connectivity, i can't remember now even though i've just done it but anyway i don't know what was limited about it because i couldn't access the internet at all so i'd say that's pretty restricted.

Neil_Jones

Limited access means what it says - limited access to the internet.

If your laptop is connecting to the mobile phone hotspot it usually means you want it to go online via the phone and out over the mobile phone network, so for that you would need data enabled on the phone.  No data = no internet =" limited access"

Of course its far easier just to tell the laptop to connect to the home wifi and get the key off the back of the router.  If it hasn't been changed, that is...

WaywardDriver

Have you tried the switching off and on thing (both laptop and router) as recommended in the 1st reply? Worked for me. 

DoaM

A couple of links that might help?

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-regain-internet-access-after-installing-update-windows-10
https://www.wikihow.com/Manually-Reset-Your-Wireless-Adapter-in-Windows

JustAnotherSaver

Right, I've got it fixed now but no, i tried what has been suggested and none of it worked. That includes:

* turning the laptop off/on/off/on

* Turning the router off, restarting the router.

* using iphone as a hotspot

* manually connecting to the router, forgetting the connection, trying again, deleting the connection, trying again. Fail Fail Fail.

* checking the password matches (it did) and trying again - Fail.

* setting up a new connection and trying again - Fail.

In the end i went to set up a new connection for the x-th time and got a message on the enter password box saying about pressing a button on the router as another way to connect. This wasn't there earlier.

So i pressed the button on the side of the BT Smart Hub and that was it - connected.

got there in the end. Thanks for the time anyway though

OS is Windows 7 Pro btw.

DoaM

So you used WPS to make the connection. Someone who knows what they're doing will be able to easily hack into any network that has WPS active.

JustAnotherSaver

DoaM said:

So you used WPS to make the connection. Someone who knows what they're doing will be able to easily hack into any network that has WPS active.

I just used the button on the side of the router and it worked because for some reason the normal way wasn't working.

First question is what's so bad about this?

Second question is how else would you make the connection?

Third question is what's the chances of someone in this area coming within WiFi range of my router and trying to get in to it (& more than that, someone who specifically wants to get in to MY router and will sit there spending the time doing so)?

I'm happy to try an alternative way though if a) it works and b) it's more secure.

giraffe69

Windows 10 might be more secure!