Windows 10 WiFi Problems Solved

I'm bringing some old machines back into commission in case I need some spare devices for our "Build a robot in a day" course on Friday. Of course I'm updating them to the latest version of Windows 10, Fall Update Creators edition. My experience has been that, unlike previous versions of Windows on low powered machines, successive versions of Windows 10 have better performance than the previous ones on resource constrained devices.  

Anyhoo, the update on my lovely Packard Bell Butterfly tablet went OK. But afterwards the WiFi didn't work. So, not OK then.

The good news is that I've seen this problem before. And fixed it. This time I'm blogging about it so that I'll remember for the next machine I find that has this problem

  1. Right click Start and open Device Manager
  2. Open the network adapters element and find your WiFi adaptor in the list.
  3.  Right click on the entry in the list and select Properties from the menu that appears..
  4. Select the Power Management tab.
  5. Make sure that the "Allow the Computer to turn off the device to save power" checkbox is clear.

Close the properties dialog and reboot the machine. You should find that WiFi now works. Or at least, I did.