Why does changing my router SSID fix network issues?

Question

Windows 10 on my laptop suddenly decided that it couldn't find my home WIFI network anymore. (It's done this twice in the last week)

I rebooted into Linux and the network was there... so it had nothing to do with the router, or my mac address being blacklisted.

I then went back onto Windows and tried various commands to reset my adapter and network settings, and deleted the network profiles it had stored.

Then I changed the network SSID.... and that worked.

Why is this?

I also found and deleted all occurrences of the old SSID in the registry (there were five), restarted windows, reset the SSID to what it was before, in order to test it... but still no luck.

Is there some command I can run to completely purge the machine of adapter history? Just as it is with a fresh OS install? Or, even better, a command to purge just that one SSID?

Answer 1

Problem solved

I changed the channel on the router and the network is back.

Given that the network showed up in Linux, I'm guessing the following is going on:

1) Changing the router SSID, caused it to switch channels too

2) The driver in windows is instructing my Wifi card to ignore particular channels

Though I'm not sure why this would be

Answer 2

To clear all wireless networks known all you have to do is to start the Command Prompt as an administrator and type

netsh wlan delete profile name=* i=*

If you want to delete just one SSID type

netsh wlan show profiles

It will display all the wireless network profiles stored by Windows 10.

Identify the name of the wireless network profile you want removed, then type the following command to remove it

netsh wlan delete profile name="profile name"

The netsh command has many other parameters besides these. If you want to learn more about it, have a look at this TechNet page