Jtdylktuy

A friend of mine had his hard drive crash and he asked me if I could install a new one. I ordered a new hard drive, installed windows 10 on it (it was installed on his other hard drive too), only to find that windows 10 won't allow me to turn on the wifi. I know that it has something to do with the driver, but I can't for the life of me figure out howto solve it.

The laptop has a "Realtek RTL8191SE Wireless LAN 802.11n PCI-E NIC". I tried every fix I could find on the internet, but nothing seems to work so far. I also can't find the appropriate driver for windows 10 anywhere. As far as I know, there is no VPN-software installed on the pc (I did a clean install of windows 10 on an empty hard disk and I don't think windows 10 installs VPN software by itself).

Anyone who can shed some light on how I can get the wifi working? Maybe a tool that could fix it for me?

I assume we cannot use the driver from here. Had a quick look, not too sure about the legitimacy of these drivers for Windows 10. For an ease-of convenience, I would recommend installing DPS - be careful, there is quite a bit of adware installed too if you do not decline.

Now I would trust there no function key or physical button preventing you from enabling wireless, and if not, I would recommend you perform the following. Open an elevated command prompt and run the following command:

netsh interface show interface

Then enable/disable the interface:

netsh interface set interface "network adapter name" admin=enable

Then we can rule out the interface being disabled. If this does not work, I'd suggest you include the device make and model (systeminfo from command prompt should help) in the question.

If you're able to enable WiFi, but not get internet access

Ensure we do not have a Static IP, DNS and prepended name - you can look at this here:

See what your DHCP server is:

ipconfig/all | findstr /i DHCP

Then, try a release and renew:

ipconfig/release && ipconfig/renew

Note if you're getting a 169.X.X.X address you're not able to get a lease from the DHCP server - check your date and time. If this is the case, I would recommend going to another PC, going to the web-interface of the home modem and ensuring there is no ACL enabled.

Now, assuming this could be an issue with your host file, or even perhaps your routing. First try notepad.exe C:WindowsSystem32driversetchosts and see if there are any additional lines (should be ::1 as localhost as the last line). Then, in the elevated command prompt, check if you have any persistent routes on the PC (you really shouldn't...)

route print

All else fails, hard-set your DNS to 8.8.8.8 and then try to browse to the internet.

tracert -d 8.8.8.8

Should see if you get to your gateway (192.168.0.1 perhaps). If you see it does not, perhaps check and make sure there is no proxy enabled on the system.