WiFi Not Working on Windows 11? Fix It in Minutes

Open Device Manager (right-click Start), expand Network adapters, find your WiFi adapter — it’ll be called something like “Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX201” or “Realtek 8822CE Wireless LAN” or “MediaTek Wi-Fi 6 MT7921.” If it has a yellow triangle, the driver is broken and that’s your answer. Double-click the adapter, go to the Driver tab, click Roll Back Driver. Restart. In our data, rolling back the driver fixes about 45% of post-update WiFi failures because Windows Update pushed a new adapter driver that doesn’t work right with the hardware.

An accountant’s HP Pavilion had been without WiFi since Friday — she’d been tethering her phone for three days to send invoices. She’d restarted the laptop, restarted the router, forgotten and reconnected to the network, run the troubleshooter. None of it worked because the WiFi option had completely vanished from her taskbar. We opened Device Manager through her phone hotspot and found the Intel AX201 with error code 10 — driver failed to load. Rolled it back from version 22.240.0.4 to 22.220.0.5, restarted, WiFi came back immediately. Four minutes.

About 55% of WiFi failures we diagnose remotely are driver problems. Another 25% are Windows Update conflicts that changed a network setting. Maybe 12% are router issues. The remaining 8% are actual hardware failures. Before you start digging: unplug your router’s power cable, count to thirty, plug it back in, give it two minutes to boot. Don’t touch the tiny recessed reset button — that factory-resets the router and wipes your WiFi password, port forwarding, everything. Also check Airplane Mode — laptops have a function key for wireless (Fn+F2 on Dell/Lenovo, Fn+F12 on HP) that’s easy to bump accidentally.

DNS and IP

If WiFi shows “Connected” with full signal bars but nothing loads, the connection to your router is fine — the problem is DNS or IP configuration. Quick test: open Command Prompt and type ping 8.8.8.8. If you get replies, your internet works and the problem is DNS resolution — your computer can reach the internet but can’t translate website names into addresses.

Open Command Prompt as admin and run three commands: ipconfig /flushdns to clear stale DNS entries, then netsh winsock reset to reset the Windows Sockets catalog, then netsh int ip reset to wipe the TCP/IP stack. Restart after all three. These together fix about 70% of “connected but no internet” cases because they eliminate corrupted network state that accumulates after VPN installs, Windows Updates, or malware removal.

If those commands don’t fix it, your ISP’s DNS servers might be down — Comcast and CenturyLink have had multiple outages in 2025-2026 that left connections looking healthy but unable to load anything. Go to Settings, Network & Internet, WiFi, click your connected network, scroll to DNS server assignment, click Edit, switch from Automatic to Manual, set 8.8.8.8 as preferred and 1.1.1.1 as alternate. If the problem was your ISP’s DNS, pages start loading the instant you save. Our DNS guide covers the full diagnostic when this doesn’t resolve it.

WLAN AutoConfig

If your WiFi adapter shows up in Device Manager with no errors but no networks appear when you scan, the WLAN AutoConfig service probably stopped running. This service manages all WiFi connections in Windows — if it crashes or gets disabled, your adapter physically works but Windows can’t use it to find networks.

Win+R, type services.msc, Enter. Find WLAN AutoConfig — it should say “Running” with Startup type “Automatic.” If it says “Stopped,” right-click, Start, and your networks should reappear within seconds. If someone changed the Startup type to “Disabled” or “Manual,” double-click the service, switch it back to Automatic. While you’re in services.msc, verify that Network Connection Broker, Network List Service, and Network Location Awareness are all running too — these four form a dependency chain and if any one is down, WiFi scanning breaks even though the adapter hardware is fine.

I see WLAN AutoConfig fail most often after antivirus or VPN installations. Kaspersky, Bitdefender, and Norton all install network filter drivers that can interfere with Windows’ native WiFi services. NordVPN and ExpressVPN create virtual network adapters that occasionally conflict. If you installed any of these recently and WiFi broke shortly after, temporarily uninstalling them is worth trying. If nothing in Device Manager or services works, try a full network reset as a last resort: Settings, Network & Internet, Advanced network settings, Network reset. This uninstalls all network adapters and reinstalls them with default settings — you’ll need to re-enter your WiFi password afterward.

Power Management

This one is specifically for WiFi that works fine while you’re using the laptop but dies every time it sleeps or sits idle. Windows tells the WiFi adapter to shut down to save battery, and when it tries to wake the adapter back up, the adapter doesn’t respond. The Realtek RTL8822CE is particularly bad about this.

Device Manager, find your WiFi adapter, double-click it, Power Management tab, uncheck “Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power.” Yes, this costs maybe 10-15 minutes of battery life per charge. The tradeoff is worth it because the alternative is spending 30 seconds reconnecting and re-authenticating every single time you open your laptop lid.

If the battery hit bothers you, there’s a less aggressive option. Search “Edit power plan” in Start, click “Change advanced power settings,” expand Wireless Adapter Settings, change the power saving mode from “Maximum Power Saving” to “Low Power Saving.” This allows light sleep states but prevents the deep sleep mode that causes adapters to lose their connection state entirely. Our WiFi disconnecting guide covers the specific adapter models that are worst about this.

If you’ve tried driver rollback, network reset, DNS fixes, service restarts, and power management — and WiFi still doesn’t work — grab a USB WiFi adapter ($12-15 on Amazon). If the USB adapter connects fine, your built-in WiFi card is dead. Most laptops since 2019 use M.2 2230 WiFi cards (Intel AX200/AX201/AX210) that cost $15-25 and take about ten minutes to swap — four screws to remove the bottom panel, one screw holding the card, two antenna cables. If your internet is connected but painfully slow rather than completely dead, that’s a different set of causes. If WiFi shows connected with full bars but says “no internet” specifically, that’s usually DNS, DHCP, or leftover proxy settings from an old VPN — different diagnostic path. If your wired connection is the one failing, Ethernet has its own set of issues — Intel I225-V bugs, LSO freezes, cable degradation. Either way, we can run adapter diagnostics and check your network stack remotely in about twenty minutes.