Laptop can’t see wifi

[Mw20242024]

Hi all, fired up my laptop I’ve not used for a while, in fact not used since we got EE broadband a few months ago. Problem is, it can’t pick up the router, it’s working ok - it can see the neighbours ones. All other devices see it ok. It’s running windows 10, I’ve tried a few things I’ve seen on YouTube tutorials but nothing has worked. Is it something to do with it not liking the router or something? I’m not overly tech savvy so please reply as if you’re explaining it to a 5 year old!

[DJPROCTOR]

A friend is also having this very problem. 

Ethernet connection to the router works and I’ve logged into the routers IP and adjusted the settings mentioned here and the router is on WiFi5, WPA2 with 2.4Ghz checked and still it’s not showing after a solid reboot. 

The device trying to connect is only a 2.4Ghz WiFi card. But still as a tech person I can’t work out what’s happened. 

Windows 10, all drivers up to date including the RealTek WiFi card and the machines had a full reinstall of Windows and factory reset to ensure it’s not something someone did before with the computer over the years. 

Any solution? Seems a few channels here have reported this. 

[colsearle]

 I tackled this yesterday when I visited a customer with an older Toshiba C850 laptop. The machine had a Realtek 2.4Ghz WiFi card.

 I tried setting the router to WiFi 5 and WPA as well as different channels to no avail.

I ended up swapping out the WiFi card for an Intel AC-7260 which connected with no problems. Router set back to WiFi 6 WPA 2.

 Cheers

[JimM11]

@colsearle Did you try to just disable the 5ghz band then connect the older device?

[colsearle]

No I guess I didn't see much point as his older WIFI card could only see 2.4Ghz.

[JimM11]

@colsearle Let us know if the customer start's to have issue's dropping wi-fi with the card you have installed.

[neilmat1971]

Hey!

My GF's laptop didn't show my new EE smarthub WiFi, Changed it down from WiFi 6 to WiFi 5 and it worked. Doing this didn't effect 3 mobile phones connection or my laptops.

Thanks 

[XRaySpeX]

@neilmat1971 : Thanks! You're welcome 🙂 ! Glad I could be of assistance & trust it is now sorted.

[David-S]

Had a very similar problem with a 10 year old Dell laptop I had upgraded to Win 10. Eventually found that the driver for the built-in Intel AC 7260 wifi adaptor has a bug that prevented it from working with wifi 6 connections. Intel created an updated driver that fixed this but for some reason the update is not easy to find and Windows 10 claims that the one it is using is the latest version (via Device Manager). Similarly, deleting the driver and allowing Windows to find and reinstall it just brings back the same faulty version. I eventually found a site that explained that the 7260 was considered obsolete by Intel and they were no longer supporting it and had pulled the latest driver - don't know if this is true but it fits the evidence. This website said that they had downloaded the latest set of 7260 drivers before Intel pulled them and they provided links to their onedrive to download them. I'm always dubious about downloading executable files from the Internet but these were found on an Intel Community site and I didn't have much to lose as the laptop was now unusable, After virus checking the files the site proved genuine and installing this new 7260 driver, via an official Inter update package, made everything work as it should. So, problem solved. I'm not going to give the link but if you search for 'intel wifi "AC 7260" problem wifi6 router' and Intel Community you should find it if its still there.

If you cant find the updated driver then you can maybe downgrade the router to work with wifi 5 instead of wifi 6 - but this seems a retrograde step !

[redvictor1]

David -S, just confirming that the latest driver from that website works on the issue with windows 7 not recognising WIFI-6 on my Dell Latitude E7740. It literally wouldn't see the EE smart hub plus router I had installed. This router will NOT downgrade to WIFI-5, so don't bother trying that, or any of the "other" fixes i've seen on the web. Do what's below and it's a 100% fix for this issue. 

The driver version needed for the Intel dual band wireless AC-7260 is 18.33.17.1 and that comes in the downloaded package of bluetooth and wifi v20.10.1 that is available on the website with the search above. Look for the WIFI v21.10.1 64bit for windows 7  download. There is a 32 bit version and also versions for windows 10 and 11. We tried the BT v20.10.1 but that only had the same version of the AC7260 as i had already. 

Huge kudos to the guy who had the foresight to download those updates from Intel before they dropped them. He has saved me (and a bunch of others) a ton of extra time and money. The beauty of Google eh folks...

[Matt_124]

For future reference for anyone coming across similar issues, the Compatible WiFi feature built in to the EE Hub allows a separate SSID to be created which should solve any issues with not being able to be found or connected to by these older devices.