Evening all. The option of wifi is suddenly no longer a thing in my laptop’s view, is there an idiots guide to resolving this issue?

Elderly HP 15 notepad running win10, I’ve tried to follow some online guides but nothing has worked so far.

Cheers, see you in the morning 🙂

Is there a switch. An old laptop of mine had a switch for the Wi-Fi. It vexed me for a while once.

If the icon has disappeared from the system tray it might be a mechanical switch as jam-bo suggests. It might also be a key combo to enable/disable. Do any of the keys have a Wi-Fi/transmitter icon in a different colour? If so the fn key plus that key might reenable. If not you’ll have to look in device manager to see if windows still thinks there’s a wifi module fitted

If it’s really sudden, like within the last week or so, and you don’t have a physical switch then try running system restore back to a point before it went wrong.  That can sometimes fix it and is often better than trying a bunch of random stuff off the internet that can make things worse :(.  Learning which suggestions on the internet aren’t mad is a skill in itself

I had the same on a lenovo it dropped the drivers after an update
Try reversing the last update or reloading the drivers – don’t ask me how.

You haven’t accidently put it in “Airplane Mode” have you?

As everyone already mentioned it above, I’m assuming you’ve check your not in airplane mode..
Like dti, I’ve seen drivers updates stopping wifi cards working. Assuming you can plug into your router I’d note which driver the wifi card is running, try updating it first (same instruction as below, but press update and not rollback), then roll it back (you don’t need a internet connection to roll it back) and see what happens:

Destructions:
https://www.techadvisor.com/how-to/windows/how-roll-back-driver-in-windows-10-3683463/

When this happened to me, the wifi card inside the laptop had died. But people were really helpful as I tried to fix it. See the suggestions here: https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/it-wizards-why-has-my-laptop-wifi-just-disappeared/

As above I had an airplane mode switch on my old laptop. Never knew it existed until I unknowingly flipped it.

I managed to make it try to restore, after several hours of being stuck updating the registry I turned it off and on again, and somehow that has fixed it despite not completing the process. I’m now backing everything up furiously in-case the laptop is getting to the point of no return.

Thanks all.

Mine sometimes disappears from the toolbar – can you not find it by going into Settings>Networks?

that does sound like a driver update issue, can I suggest you turn off the auto update option for the drivers? Or it might just re-install the update later and you’ll be back to no wifi again.

https://www.minitool.com/news/disable-automatic-driver-updates-win-10-009.html

this does mean all of your devices will no longer auto update, which isn’t great as most updates usually improve things, but if it stop your laptop doing weird and wonderful stuff, it might be worth it.

My work surface laptop does this every now and again. The solution I was given was to hold down the power button for ages to force a shutdown – has to be this not shutdown from the menu. This apparently clears some retained setting and then on restart the wifi appears again. Last time it happened it needed two shutdowns but it fixed it.

@theartist all trace of wifi-ness had gone, thankfully I had a powerline adapter and ethernet cable not yet packed for the house move 🙂

@z1ppy I can see myself getting in a tangle with that, I only know enough to get myself into trouble – and then I forget what fixed it last time 🙁

@matthewlhome my kind of fix! Will try that in the next few weeks when it happens again…

And again, thanks to all.

If it’s the same as the old HP laptop I had, there’s a little light on the corner of (I think) the F9 key. If it’s blue, the WiFi is on, if it’s red, it’s off. To switch between, press that key!

By far the first thing to check is windows updates always!

They have an uncanny knack and usually give you an idea if they’ll be applying shortly as you’ll see things like your screen flicker as a display adapter hidden in the update is being primed, or sound drop off briefly. In some cases if it is an update then it can take a few reboots after it’s applied for the machine to settle down.
Also if it coincides with a windows update usually removing that update if you can through the windows update console can fix things.

Hope you get it sorted