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I am looking at a Toshiba P745-S4102 laptop for a friend who says that it cannot connect to wifi. It started (I guess) this past summer and she has been slow to get around to it.
Upon getting the machine I made sure that the wifi card was on and that it was seeing networks. Everything seemed fine and I tried connecting to a wireless network but windows reported that it failed connecting to the network, however it is listed as connected but no packets have been sent/received. Ok fine. So I tried a different network that I knew was working (my Mac is connected to it). Again widows says that it failed to connect but is showing up like it did connect. I then run an ipconfig /all which doesn't show any network devices at all. Only thing is shows is host name, dns suffix, node type, ip routing disabled, wins proxy disabled.
Ok obviously it must be a driver issue. So I uninstall both the LAN and wifi drivers and reinstall them. Device manager is showing them as working fine. I try to connect again with the same issues. Re-run ipconfig /all same issue. Last resort is to do a system restore to an earlier point. This also doesn't work and shows the same symptoms.
After this I plugged in a known good network cable but even the LAN is not working. The same problems persist under safe mode.
All I can think of to do is factory reset, but if possible I would rather not. Hopefully someone out there has had or seen this issue and can help me?
Gerad Bottorff
Posted 2014-01-14T18:19:44.347
Reputation: 63
Try to reset the TCP/IP stack by running this command in an elevated command prompt : netsh int ip reset – shinjijai – 2014-01-14T18:36:08.253
I did that just after I posted this and it didn't work :( Thanks for the idea and response though! – Gerad Bottorff – 2014-01-14T18:41:25.947
1I would boot up to a linux live cd and see if networking works in there. – shinjijai – 2014-01-14T18:51:41.227
1It could be several different things causing this. Exactly as @shinjijai suggests - you need to troubleshoot and determine if the hardware is broken. Booting from a different OS (like a LiveCD, or using a fresh Windows install) is the best/easiest way to determine that. – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007 – 2014-01-14T19:05:55.853
I don't know why I only thought of a re-install of Windows and not a live CD. Doh! Downloading one now to test. – Gerad Bottorff – 2014-01-14T20:03:09.810
Booting into an Ubuntu live disk allows me to connect to the networks. I am guessing at this time that I need to re-install Windows. – Gerad Bottorff – 2014-01-14T20:56:35.903
1Is this a windows vista machine? I've had problems in the past with certain updates disabling internet access (not network) for no apparent reason. Havn't heard of it on any other OS so if its not then my theory is shot =P – jak138 – 2014-01-14T22:15:04.287
Hey jak138. It is a Windows 7 machine and in all my years of IT I have never seen this happen to a machine (hence my post here). – Gerad Bottorff – 2014-01-14T23:40:47.323