Windows 7 does not "use" Intel wireless adapter. How do I fix it?

Yesterday, my WiFi was working great, as usual. But then all of a sudden, the Wifi literally stopped working by itself. The Windows 7 taskbar utility thing (where you can see networks), lagged up and was unresponsive.

I rebooted and when I tried to connect there was a red "X" next to the little set of bars in the taskbar. The adapter was ON, however. I checked device manager - the adapter, Intel Centrino N6230, was there, enabled, and listed as working properly. No excelmation marks or anything like that.

The software for it, Intel MyWifi, states the adapter is not present. All of its functions are greyed out. I tried re-installing drivers - nothing changed.

I tried it in Safe Mode, no joy.

I tried to do a System Restore but it does not work because of an error: "Could not access a file. This may be because of an antivirus program. Disable it and try again." It was something like that. I tried disabling but it STILL gave the same error.


I know my hardware is fine, because when I try to use it under a different OS, Ubuntu-Linux, it runs perfectly fine.

Please help? This is extremely frustrating.

2xg,

Thanks for the reply.

The strange thing is that I've never seen the IntelMyWifi software before. This is the first time. I've always had Windows do the network operations for me. The funny thing is, this has happened to me a few months ago. That incident ended badly, as somehow I got The Blue Screen of Death and therefore resorted to a fresh install.

I wasn't going to let that happen this time.

Turns out, two critical Windows Updates took place a couple of days before this problem showed its ugly face. Maybe it had an effect, maybe not. But a similar scenario occurred the previous time.

I uninstalled all third party programs related to wireless functions. Rebooted, and nothing occurred. WLAN AutoConfig was already on automatic, and started.

Safe Mode driver re-installation did nothing.

I showed Windows who's the boss here and did something new. System Restore, the one Windows set when it did the initial (first of the two) critical updates. I rebooted and it instantly connected to my home network, no problems in sight.

Looks like the problem was easier to solve than I thought. I've seen threads like this all over the interwebs, with the solutions revolving around restore points, driver re-installs, or extreme things like wiping it clean.

This was clearly a config problem - I suppose something in the updates caused a confusion between the third party services and the native Windows side of things.

Thanks for the insight.