Does the wifi disappear on your laptop? It might be just me, but I’ve had this recurring, intermittent and extremely annoying problem for a while. By wifi disappearing I don’t mean the wifi network, I mean the wifi adaptor itself. The laptop just doesn’t seem to realise it is wifi enabled. I finally found a fix, or at least a workaround.

You do need administrator access

STEP 1- open a command prompt as administrator
You can do this by typing ‘command’ into the search box and then right clicking on “Command Prompt” and selecting ‘Run as administrator’,

STEP 2- devmgmt.msc
This opens device manager as administrator. There may be an easier way of doing this than these 2 steps, in which case just do that.

STEP 3 – Go to the menus. View -> Show hidden devices

STEP 4 – you can now select your wireless adaptor (it should be under ‘Network Adaptors’).

STEP 5 – Right Click and -> Scan for Hardware changes

STEP 6 – that should be it. No reboot required, at least for me.

So far, wifi has stayed with me. I suspect I’ll lose it again at the next windows update.

Hope that helps at least someone, even if that’s just me in 6 months.