Question Windows 10 not connecting to the internet

nitram_tpr

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Hi guys,

My neighbour has asked me to take a look at her laptop, it's an Acer Aspire that came with windows 8, it recently upgraded itself to Windows 10 and since then is connecting to her BT router but not to the internet.
This is for both a wired and wireless connection. The connections show 'No Internet, secured'.
I've googled for this and it looks to be very common and frustratingly for me, none of the fixes work :(

Here is a list of what I have done, in no particular order:

  • Updated the drivers for both the wired and wireless interfaces
  • Uninstalled the wireless and Ethernet adapters
  • run the following commands as admin at the command prompt
  • netsh winsock reset
  • netsh int ip reset
  • ipconfig /release
  • ipconfig /renew
I've connected to 3 different wireless networks and one wired network and it always comes up with the same thing.

One strange thing is that the connections are set for DHCP but the IP address that gets assigned is in completely the wrong subnet! My router has the range 10.0.0.xxx but the laptop has 169.254.88.113 (Preferred) set as the autoconfiguration IPv4 Address with a subnet mask of 255.255.0.0.

After I run the netsh commands and reboot the laptop it will connect using the correct subnet but will still have the 'No Internet, secured' message against the wi-fi or wired connection.

I've been working on this for a day and a half now and am completely stumped. I've a good mind to wipe the HDD and install Windows 7!

Any help gratefully received.

TIA

Martin
 
Last edited:
What wifi adapter does it have? Not sure if this will help you but I had a problem with the qualcomm atheros ar5bwb222 card in my acer desktop pc. Win 10, wouldn't connect or very briefly. In the end I swapped the white and grey wires around that connect to the adapter card and hey presto it works. Maybe worth a go if you can do this on the laptop.
 
Are you connecting to her router or your router with her laptop?

The 169.x.x.x address is means it hasn't managed to get an IP address for DHCP so is defaulting to one in that range.

ipconfig /release in that instance wouldn't have done much

ipconfig /renew did that timeout?

Do any of her other devices work? Did you try a reboot on router?

And why would the hell would you want to reinstall Windows 7 that's going out of support soon ...
 
Are you connecting to her router or your router with her laptop?

The 169.x.x.x address is means it hasn't managed to get an IP address for DHCP so is defaulting to one in that range.

ipconfig /release in that instance wouldn't have done much

ipconfig /renew did that timeout?

Do any of her other devices work? Did you try a reboot on router?

And why would the hell would you want to reinstall Windows 7 that's going out of support soon ...

I said Windows 7 out of frustration more than anything else!
So.....

1. I have the laptop at my house, this has the 10.0.0.xxx range
2. Her router is a BT ADSL router so will have (I believe) a 192.168.x.x range, not sure if it is a 1.0 or a 0.0 at the end.
3. It doesn't matter if it is logged on to her router or mine it will at some stage show the 169.x.x.x range. As per my OP, if I run the netsh commands and reboot it'll come up with the correct 10.0.0.x IP but will not have any internet connectivity.

Yes, it does have a qualcomm atheros wi-fi card, an ar956x.
However, I do get the exact same problem with a cat 5 plugged into my router!

TIA

Martin
 
Can you give it a fixed IP, DNS and gateway just to see if its DHCP or something else?
 
I think I've fixed it...turned out to be a gash firewall setting that was still lingering after the old antivirus was uninstalled.
I was double checking the Wireless Network Connection status and in this window (not the laptop in question but...) there was an option for a firewall for the old anti virus. I deleted that and hey presto, internet access!

upload_2018-1-16_15-44-24.png


Thanks for the help, looking for the DHCP settings and attempting to manually set the IP address led me here.
 
Glad you got sorted, AV would have been my next check as I have seen that do strange things.

I hate the fact it takes so long sometimes to track these things down but then you get a moment of elation as it starts working :)
 
Oh yes, elation indeed :clap: I'd nearly given up and was gonna suggest a full hdd wipe and re-install of windows, but it would've been windows 8 from a recovery disc, so glad we didn't have to go down that route.
 
For future reference Windows 10 has built in reinstall functionality (called reset) so there's no need to wipe and reinstall from disk on an otherwise working system.
 
I've been having similar issues on my desktop PC (no WiFi, wired LAN only) since the last big Win10 update was installed.
I would get an invalid IP address message when running the network diagnostics. Uninstalled LAN driver, updated driver, rebooted router etc. but the only way to get on the internet was to reboot the PC each time I sat down at it. But as soon as the screen saver kicked in it would disconnect again. I also search around and found it was a common issue, but all the cmd & powershell commands failed to fix it.
Eventually I tried (ignoring the obvious to start with every time) going into device manager and right click on the adapter and selecting 'scan for hardware changes' and thankfully this seems to activate the LAN correctly allowing me onto the internet. More of a workaround than a fix, but quicker & easier than constantly rebooting the PC.

Mark.
 

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