Troubleshoot network problems - Windows Tutorial

- [Instructor] Finding the problem when network issues arise is sometimes easy, like reconnecting a disconnected ethernet cable. With a laptop, perhaps is something simple as well, like re-enabling WiFi or turning off airplane mode. These options are available from the task bar and the network icon. You can see WiFi, here, is turned on because it's blue, but if it's turned off, go ahead and click it, enable it again. The same for airplane mode. It should be gray if you're trying to connect to a network. If it isn't, click it to toggle it off. If you checked this, but still can't connect, make sure the local router is plugged in and turned on, and that you're in range of a network and connected to it. Check any ethernet cables too, to make sure they aren't crimped or damaged. If you find, though, after clicking the network icon on the task bar, that you actually are connected to a wireless network, like I am here, note that it's possible to have a wireless connection enabled and seemingly working, but still be unable to connect to parts of the network you feel you should be able to get to. In these cases, it could be that the network is set to public when it needs to be set to private. To see if this is the case, click Start, click Settings, and click Network and Internet. Click either WiFi or ethernet. I'll click WiFi. Click the network name, it doesn't look like it's a link to anything, but it is. If the network is set to public and it should be private, go ahead and change it. Mine is already set to private, so I'm okay here. Since mine is at private and I'm still having problems, I'm going to need to look at another setting, Network Discovery. Network Discovery needs to be enabled for the computer to be able to view and connect to resources on the network. The option for Network Discovery is available from the Advanced Sharing settings in the Network and Sharing Center. There are lots of ways to get there, but I'll go right here to the Status tab and click Network and Sharing Center. From here, I'll choose Change advanced sharing settings. You can see here from my private connection, which is my current profile, that Network discovery is turned off. This is most likely the source of my particular problem, so I'll choose to turn it on, and I'll click Save changes. From the Network and Sharing Center, you can also access the troubleshooting wizards. The wizards let you select the type of problem you're having and helps you resolve it, let me show you. I'll click Troubleshoot problems. Since we're talking about networks, I'll go ahead and scroll down, and I'll pretend I'm having a problem with the network adapter, which I may well be. I'll double-click that to get started. Let's let that run, see what it finds. So it gives me the option to Select the network adapter to diagnose. I'm going to tell you now that previously I disabled my ethernet adapter just so we'd have something to look at. So I'm going to click Ethernet here, and I'll show you. Watch what Windows does. It says, "Look, hey, your ethernet adapters disabled. Do I want to try these repairs as an administrator?" All I have to do is click there, and then it'll fix the problem. I'm not going to do that right now because I'd like to show you one other thing, and I'd like to leave this disabled. I need to look at my list of adapters and see if any have problems. And, although, there are several ways to get there, I'll go back to the Network and Sharing Center's main screen, and I'll go to the Change adapter options. I'll click Network and Internet from settings, here I'll click Network and Sharing Center, I'll maximize this window, and I'll click Change adapter settings. You can see here that my ethernet adapter is disabled. I can right-click and enable it, and I can also view Properties. I'm going to go ahead and click Properties now and show you one last little thing. Here, on Internet Protocol Version 4, sometimes we run into problems with network adapters, even if they're enabled, if DHCP has been somehow turned off. I'm going to click Properties here. I want you to look right here that I have an option selected to use the following IP address. That IP address may not be something that's going to work on my network. If you find this is the problem go ahead and write down the address, and then select Obtain an IP address automatically. If nothing else has solved your problem, this probably will. There's one other thing I'd like to show you before I close out this movie, and that's the network reset option. I'm going to go back to the Settings window, I'm going to go back to Network and Internet, and back to Status. And, here, at the very bottom, is Network reset. Read this before you make your move because this will remove and then re-install all of your network adapters, and it's going to set all of your networking components back to their original settings. That's quite a commitment, make sure you've tried everything else before you choose Reset now. As with the other movies, continue to explore before you move on. There are other options in the Settings window, like airplane mode and WiFi status. And when you're finished, close all opened windows.