And Then A Wlan….

And that’s where I’ve been. Doing battle with that ol’ Mr Wlan.autoconfig thingy.

Remember the new Windows 8 laptop I ‘had’ to buy on the demise of the ‘old’ laptop?  Well, for reasons only known to Windows 8, on Sunday, the new fellow just decided it didn’t want to connect to the outside world. Didn’t even want to show me any available networks. 

What to do. Take it back to the store?  A tad defeatist don’t you think? Not wanting to bother with the  option offered in the results of the basic trouble shooting application; Phone a Friend, I moved on to the old standby, fiddling.

Through the first few fiddles I discovered that Wlan.autoconfig wasn’t running despite being set to auto run. {If you ever run{pun} into this problem, you’ll find him in ‘Services’.}  I started him – this isn’t too technical or hard to do; there’s a really big button with ‘Start’ written in it.

This worked but he quickly stopped again.  Back to ‘Services’ and hit start again.  This time it resulted in another big box firing up announcing, basically, no can do as something else needs to be running and it isn’t.

Now what to do. back to Wlan.auto. Click to open him and there’s a tab at the top called ‘Dependencies’. Let’s have a look then. Okay, a list of stuff there so I did what I do quite well and went back to fiddling.  I listed all the entries, found them all in ‘Services’, started them all and also set them to start automatically.

This got him started. But…. as I’ve said many times before, there’s always a ‘but’ – but every time I re-started the computer or woke him from sleep mode, I had to go to Services and manually start Wlan.auto.

No big deal, make a shortcut to Services, whizz down the W bits, click start and go, but not totally satisfactory.

Ah, Ha! What if the dependencies I switched to auto start also had dependencies that needed switching to auto start? And what if those dependencies had dependencies that needed switching to auto start? Damn! This could take a while.

Guess what?  That wasn’t too bad as most pointed to only two more entries that I had to set to auto start - Extensible Authentication Protocol and Remote Procedure Call (RPC).

With all this eventually done I made my last throw of the dice.  A throw many of you may well think should’ve been throw one, and did that old favourite, SFC /SCANNOW

This being Windows 8 you go to the charms bar, search for ‘command’ and when the link pops up, and this is the kicker that took me a while to figure, dumb as I am, don’t fire him up. What you need to do is right click him and this pops up a string of choices along the bottom of the screen. Down along the bottom, amongst all the choices, click on Run As Administrator.  If you miss this move he won’t do nothing.

Viola!! Corrupt files found and repaired. He be back as he was and I’m as happy as a Wink Bingo dog!! The big question, what went wrong in the first place? No answer and no idea I’m afraid. 

There you go then. If you have, or get, Windows 8 and suddenly find you have no wireless, try the above.  After all I did, knowing what I do now, where would I start? SFC /SCANNOW of course.

Will it work for you?  How could I possibly know?  But it’s a starting point should you find yourself in the same position.

As an interesting by-the-by, last night, me being at the end of my tether, and said tether stretched out like a bungee line, I dug out the ‘old’ laptop. 

Now, back when, he wouldn’t start at all; no boot; no safe mode; no nothing at all. Bricked, I believe is the technical term. Last night, I plugged him in, hit the power button – I guess you can guess what comes next. Powered up faultlessly, connected himself, downloaded and installed Windows updates, re-started…. need I go on?  So what was that earlier stuff all about then? 

Rest of the evening was spent trying to explain and justify the expense of the new guy to her indoors.

Quote;  Heinrich Rudolf Hertz

“I do not think that the wireless waves I have discovered will have any practical application.”