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I am helping a friend fix his computer but I have been battling with the problem for over 5hours. It’s a Toshiba Satellite laptop, model P50-C-11v The wifi icon is not displayed on the taskbar. It is not found when searched for. No WLAN driver. Once downloaded and installed, it doesn’t appear. I have gone to gpedit.msc to enable and disable the “remove icon…”, and reverted to its initial stage. None could fix it. I have gone to services as an administrator to start the WLAN manager, WLAN Autoconfig, and wifi manager, and restarted the system, to no avail. I went to bios settings, entered advanced settings and security, I couldn’t find anything related to wifi or WLAN there which is not enabled. I saw LAN and it’s enabled. I solved a similar problem on a Lenovo system through the Bios settings, I enabled the i/o port access under security there but I am finding it hard to solve the same issue on Toshiba. Running Windows Update Assistant did not solve it. Resetting the system did not solve it. I went to device manager and selected show hidden drivers. I found the WLAN driver there. I scanned the network adapter for hardware changes, reset the system but still can’t find the wifi or WLAN connection in the system. I need help here please.see photo Laptop model: Toshiba P50-C-11V. ……. OS: Windows 10 pro version 21H1 Update (06/28/2021)
Here are some photos @jayeff @tomchai
Hi, What is the status of the WLAN adapter in Device Manager > right click on adapter entry > Properties > General > device status box? Does it say that this device is working properly? If so, try resetting the network stack (not sure if this is what you meant when you said that you “reset the system”) Type cmd in the Windows search box on the Taskbar and then click on “run as administrator” In the Command window, type the following commands one at a time and then hit Enter after each command ipconfig /release ipconfig /flushdns ipconfig /renew netsh int ip reset netsh winsock reset Yes there is a space before the / symbol in some of the commands Then restart the laptop and check the WiFi
Forget about the driver, does the device itself appear in the device manager? If there is no device, why would installing the driver help?
Some Toshiba laptops from ~2010 and newer have a WLAN whitelist that isn’t honest about its presence like the IBM and HP ones before they gave up on it. Is the card a Toshiba specific card with the right FCC ID? If not, that’s what they like to use a lot of the time to see. Try another card that’s super obviously not from Toshiba (think like pulling a card from a Dell or HP, and putting in the Toshiba) and see what it does - if it happens then, it’s a WL issue most likely. If not, the card may be defective.
