I have an Acer Swift laptop running Windows 11 that's about 5 years old. It's been working fine, except for the occasional restart problem. Last night when I got home, the Wi-Fi option completely vanished and I can't access the advanced network settings. It feels like all network services have disappeared from my laptop. I've tried disabling and uninstalling drivers, troubleshooting (which just gives me an error message), and I've restarted my laptop about 20 times. I've even gone into the BIOS and tried several command lines in administrative mode. I can't seem to find any WLAN adapter, even though I've been using the Intel(R) Wi-Fi 6 AX200 160 MHz as my adapter. I'm really confused and could use some help!
2 Answers
It sounds like you're checking the right adapter. Make sure to use the keystroke specific to Acer laptops to enable or disable the wireless card—sometimes they can accidentally get turned off. After that, go into Device Manager and select View > Show Hidden Devices. If your adapter shows up but isn’t functioning, it’s possible it has failed. If that’s the case, replacement networking cards are pretty affordable and easy to install!
Also, keep in mind that rebooting might not help much anymore if it’s getting stuck on the loading screen for too long. It sounds like your laptop is having serious issues if it's just looping back to the error message without actually rebooting. Have you tried a forced shutdown instead?
Thanks for the tip! I tried the keystroke, but fn + f3 (and the others) didn't do anything. I see my adapter in the hidden devices section, and it looks to be online. There's also a Microsoft Wi-Fi Direct Virtual Adapter #2 that seems offline, but I’m not sure what that means. The Bluetooth is still okay, at least.