I still have not had time to Linux on my Dell XPS 15 laptop and still have to suffer from Windows oddness that I do not know.
It does not help that this is the first time that I use Windows 8.1 and some things aare unfamiliar and to me very unintuitive. Under Linux I know where to look. Under Windows more than once in the last month did I have to resort to a reboot because things just stopped working or the machine went into slow motion mode and did not recover otherwise.
Yesterday just before going home I wanted to log back on to the the corporate WLAN “WLAN-One”. Just before I was connected, but I shut-down already and when powering on the machine hung after the Windows log-in. Several minutes passed and at some point it logged my into my Windows profile.
I could not log on to WLAN-One though. So tried corporate WLAN-Two. Nope.
Reboot. Nope neither work. Tried tethering to my tablet’s WLAN-tab. Nope.
Shutdown. Waiting. Start up. Nope.
Removed all connections (“forget”).Nope, none of the WLANs work.
Then I noticed that stupid windows remembered the wrong details. When connecting to WLAN-Two or WLAN-tab, ipconfig /all still showed connection information (IP, DNS, Gateway) for WLAN-One. These details always stayed the same once connected to any of the three.
Played with netsh with lots of delete/remove command. Rebooted. Still the same.
Tried for a good part of an hour to no avail. Search the web, checked out help information nothing helped.
Decided on a whim to restart the DHCP Clien service in the “services.msc” console.
Fixed !
Stupid Windows.
I sometimes have similar pains with Linux, but I know where to look and what do fix because it easy to find once you understand the concept.
I recently helped a Mac owner to resolve custom DNS issues, which wasn’t as easy since I am not a Mac user.
Moral of my story:
- Even though computer usability came very far in the last decade(s) I and others are still hitting similar problems as 30 years ago.
- Generally wordprocessing, Visio, PowerPoint are still tedious to use
- Rebooting (or restarting things) solves most issues
Quite a few times I am having problems connecting to existing WiFi connections on my Dell XPS15 with Windows 8.1. Even though other devices can connect to the same WiFi switching between them does not work (‘limited connectivity’ aka no IP connectivity).
Even though rebooting did not help, restarting the DHCP client service did resolve it.