I usually would just uninstall it from device manager after downloading the newest wifi driver.. Then restart and windows will re-install it. If not, you can install it.

Might need to re-enter the passphrase.

Noooooo!

Suggesting that a novice user should muck around with drivers is more dangerous than helpful, in my opinion.

Why not start with the basics?
--------------------------------------------
Do you have a touch screen? If so, do the following:

Swipe a finger to the left from the right edge (that opens the so-called Charms bar)

There should be an icon that says "Available" at the bottom. Touch Available

Is Wi-Fi turned On?

Do you see your network signal listed?

Touch it. Then Touch Connect.

It may ask for Wi-fi password. Enter it.
___________________________________

If you can get through this sequence, you should be connected. If not, or if no touch screen, please report back

Thank you...yes, i am a novice and have touchscreen.

I do see my network listed. When i click on it i only have the option to 'forget it'....? I have no option to connect. I am not at the location right now to verify that to be exact wording. For sure, if i could see where to connect, i would, but that option does not come up.

Wi-Fi is turned on.

I believe this happened before and if this old memory serves me right, at that time HP support had me uninstall the adapter and re-start for it to rebuild and that worked. I am working up the courage to try that, but it will have to be tomorrow sometime.

Thoughts on that?

I will post back tomorrow. Thanks.

If you can contact HP support, then I recommend you do that. They can expertly walk you through iterative steps to isolate and then (hopefully) correct the cause of the problem.

Trying to do that kind of thing with communications like forum posts that are hours apart are like throwing buckets of poo over the wall into your neighbor's yard - some hit what you want, some don't and then you realize the request wasn't for poo.

Good luck.

Ha ha...i like your analogy.

Any thoughts on at least uninstalling adapter and restarting?

Actually, I did call HP. They wanted $50 to help me or sell me extended warranty for over $120/yr.

Good advice though SnidelyWhiplash.

Thanks

HP's page for all the various troubleshooting and uninstall/reinstall steps is here :
HP PCs - Troubleshooting Wireless Network and Internet (Windows 8)

On that page you'd want to go to Step 2, which includes steps using either "HP Recovery Manager", or alternatively, Windows' Device Manager (which is the way most of us IT people do it.)
I'd start with the "HP Recovery Manager" method (but it doesn't matter too much).

The only thing there is that it eventually asks you to choose your wireless adapter from a list, for reinstall. (A "wireless adapter" is just the piece of hardware on your laptop that provides the wireless functionality.)
Unless you know that already, I would go to the next method still in Step 2 and first use Device Manager just to find out what Wireless adapter you have.
Then go back and first try the HP Recovery Manager method.

That will probably work. If it doesn't, try the 2nd method in Step 2 and actually use Device Manager for the reinstall.

If neither of those work, report back and we'll help you with the next steps to try, which is Step 3 on that page.

Don't worry too much. Even if you mess it up, it's all fixable.

Thank you kbarb....I remember the HP tech saying (before I hung up from him) it may be the adaptor or the proxy settings. Proxy settings is where my eyes glaze over a bit. When I get back at it later today, I will report back.

Normal home internet use shouldn't require any consideration of proxy settings. When I've needed to make proxy settings (for like geographical IP masking) it was done in the browser.

All other devices have wifi so i dont understand why it would be modem/router, but then there are a lot of things i dont understand in 8.1.

Right now I am sitting at machine attempting to uninstall Ralink adapter in device mgr., and uninstall doesnt appear to be running. It has taken up to five minutes and progress bar is just moving...'OK' and 'cancel' are grayed out. Cant see anything to end task in task mgr.

BTW: Preceding this issue i did a Malwaybytes program update and Windows update.

Going to shut down and pray. Maybe i will call my internet provider....i dont think they charge, but who knows.

Yeh, highly unlikely it's anything proxy related - that wasn't a smart move to confuse things with that. Also unlikely it's a modem or router related problem, based on what you've told us. It sounds more like a driver installation problem as you aren't getting any option for "Connect", which is part of the driver.

If it didn't seem to work the first time around, I'd try it again using Device Manager. You could disable it first there - that might help.

Well, glory be.....shut down machine while 'uninstall' was not responding and got wifi back. Go figure.

Do i maybe need a new adapter? ...this has happened before.

thanks one and all for your time and advice.

It probably actually uninstalled, then Windows found it at restart and reinstalled it.
If that didn't work I was going to recommend hitting it, which doesn't usually work but at least feels good. ;-)
Good luck !

ps-1: it's not that easy or even possible always to change the network adapter on a laptop.
You could use a usb network adapter but that's not ideal as it's hanging off the side all the time.
I'd hang in there for a while and see how it goes.

ps-2: I think mikie_gw's been exonerated.

It was dl'g the newest driver that I wasn't comfortable with, not knowing how to do that, but yes, mikie_gw's...you were right!

Seems odd to me, something that should happen rarely or never has happened twice with this PC?

Go figure...probably not the last time either.

Sure but, if you're working with a laptop, you'd be stuck with non-functioning wireless anytime you took it elsewhere. The problem was not one of the usual connectivity issues, but a driver issue. Better to fix it ahead of time when you're aware of it.

I have no suggestion for the current situation but I do have one for the future - avoid buying HP laptop or desktop products. Apologies, I've said before in this forum, I think HP's PC products are inferior to their competition. My company (which has tens of thousands of users) stopped buying them because of quality problems.

I to agree about buying HP in the furture! Don't like the way HP Handles Their Business! I too have experienced HP wanting to charge extra for their technical help. Also had a problem with their policy on not releasing new drivers for printers older than 5 yrs. I've since moved to Brother Printers and have never been happier.

I imagine that it's a Driver that's causing problems with your WiFi Card. I'm betting a Driver that was installed after a Microsoft Windows Update caused your problem. This usually happens when someone has their computer set to Automatically Install Updates. You most likely have a Driver installed now that is a little older and your WiFi Card is now working. I would go to the Update area and Hide any Updates that refer to Ralink WiFi Adaptor, this way you don't accidently install another Driver for your WiFi Card. I would also set the computer to only install updates when you say it's okay to install them.

I recently purchased a New Acer Laptop with Windows 8. After installing the Windows 8.1 App and all Microsoft Updates I started experiencing WiFi Problems. I could sit right next to my router and could connect just fine but if I moved 10 feet away I would loose the connection. Occasionally I could connect in the front room of the house but it was very intermittent. I did try uninstalling the device and reinstalling new/different drivers for the WiFi Card, nothing worked.

I decided to find a New WiFi - Bluetooth Card for my Laptop. I found one Online, Ebay for $2.80 Shipped. I installed the New WiFi- Bluetooth Card and installed Drivers for it. I now have a good working WiFi a/b/g/n - w/Bluetooth Card in my New Acer Aspire Laptop. I have since taken the Old WiFi - Bluetooth Card (from my new Laptop) and installed it in my Old Acer Laptop. This laptop has Windows 7 SP1 installed and the Card Loaded and works great in my Old Acer Laptop. This computer didn't have Bluetooth before and now does with the addition of the Card that wouldn't work in my new laptop.

On my Acer Laptops it was very easy to Access and Install the New WiFi Cards. On some other brands it may not have the same type of easy access. In the field of computers you have your Fords and your General Motor's. The Ford's use very few Bolts to hold on a cover and the General Motor's Cars use 10x the amount of Bolts to hold on the same cover. Well, IMO the Acer Computers are the (Ford's) and the HP are the (General Motor Cars). This makes the HP computer much more difficult to work on! Not saying it won't be easy to replace the card on your HP, but it is a good possibility that it might be tough.

Great tips everyone!

Likely my last HP product. Too bad to because I thought they were one of the better companies.

I do believe the Win. updates played a part in this so I will be customizing my settings there...thanks for that advice.

Bugspop1: Your analogies were very good (Ford/GM)...made me laugh as I worked in the automotive parts industry all my life. However, you will not see me swapping out cards or anything else too soon. I will leave that up to someone who knows a card from a power source. I just use 'em...I don't tinker with them. Life is frustrating enough for me, I guess.

A million thanks to all of you.

I have 4PC's all HP products never paid for support in fact one of the big guys gave me his ext. number. They have always been great! not much support needed except for a noisy PC, which I sent back as per their instructions and Free. They returned with a new HD and all my files back in, in 3 days.

Whether at HP or any other, "big guys" don't get involved with individual customer support issues.

Who cares if they do or not ? Her post is about her satisfaction with HP support. What's the point of a grouchy comment like that.

Not suggesting changing automatic updating, but Windows updates can occasionally cause problems. Just the last couple days, I ran the command sfc /scannow and it found corrupted, unrepairable system files for the first time. Alittle searching & found a solution to uninstall (and then hide) eight(!) of some of the latest updates and that solved it. So MS is sending out occasional problematic updates.

Same goes for updates to Android devices...and other platforms, I'm sure. They always seems to take steps backwards instead of forward in the the interest of improving functionality and stability.

Makes you wonder who's in charge.

Hmm, that's weird. In all my many years of running updates, I don't remember ever having one of them go bad. Interesting, maybe I've just been lucky.

I agree w/bugs above, after this latest incident I posted above, I'm going back to my old method of manually installing updates, for which I never had any issues. Alittle tedious, but I look at MS's site to examine each update & decide whether to install it. But this method isn't for everyone.

kbarb, run sfc /scannow from your command-prompt window.....

I have to say...I started visiting the garden web forums back in 1999. The members were wonderful then, helping me get off the ground, computer wise, and i felt I had made some terrific new friends. Over the years, computer took a back seat to real life, but now that I have revisited GW computer help forums, I find different people, but happy to say....just as terrific.

I will help others where I can, to give back, but only if I am confident my advice is correct....

Good to be home!

"What's the point of a grouchy comment like that."

I found her comment amusing, nothing more.

On a more interesting topic, updates, I experience hiccups with the monthly Windows updates pretty regularly. Maybe two or three times a year? They usually come around the 15th of the month. Sometimes PCs become sluggish or exhibit odd behavior. There are times when a further update gets pushed out the next day, or a few days later, and these seem to contain fixes. Very rarely, maybe every few years, I find myself rolling back to the previous month's update to let it settle down, and then the subsequent month's update makes everything right again.

I always use auto-update for Windows and my main applications, I think doing otherwise is silly.

Over the years I've had a few problems with Microsoft Updates. I assume that the recent problem I had with the WiFI / Bluetooth card in my New Laptop (Windows 8.1) was Driver related. It worked fine until I installed an MS Driver Update for the WiFi Adaptor. I tried Rolling the Driver Back but it refused to work. I tried Uninstalling the Card and reinstalling with totally different drivers and that didn't work. I finally replaced the card with another and it's working great. The card I replaced works great in my old laptop with Windows 7. I have hidden the MS driver that I believe originally caused the problem. Even though I installed a totally different Model WiFi / Bluetooth Card (same Manufacturer), MS was still offering the same Driver Update.

Sorry and not to hack this post but my Dell inspiron 3520 is doing the same thing I updated from Windows 8 to Windows 10 and then after a Microsoft Update I experienced the same issues, I was able to do a system restore once but that didn't work the next time I tried it.

So now I want to replace the Wireless Card I figure I need one capable of running Win 10 is there anything else ?