Have you been struggling with an Internet downtime for a while? If you’ve tried your luck with all the usual hacks like tweaking router settings, computer restart, or malware scans, but still don’t have much to show for it, then perhaps the problem might lie somewhere else.
Sometimes, in situations like these, the difficulty is not the internet connection or the computer but the Wi-Fi drivers themselves. In this article, we take a look at how you can reinstall your Wi-Fi drivers to try to fix your internet connection.
How to reinstall Wi-Fi drivers in Windows 10 or Windows 11
A Wi-Fi driver is software necessary to run the Wi-Fi hardware built into your PC or laptop. Like anything technical, it can sometimes go bust. If the issue is not the with the hardware itself, then a quick reinstallation is usually enough to get everything back on track. In general, there are two different ways to go about reinstalling your Wi-Fi drivers on Windows 10 or 11. Let’s go over both of them one by one.
Reinstall your Wi-Fi drivers through Device Manager
The Device Manager is a free Windows programs that lets you view and control hardware attached to your computer. It makes sense, then, that you can use it for reinstalling your Wi-Fi drivers on Windows.
To get started, here’s what you’ve to do:
- Go to the Start menu search menu, type in ‘device manager,’ and select the best match.
- In the Device Manger, expand the Network adaptors.
- Right-click on the Wi-Fi driver and select Properties. Take notes of the driver name and version, so you can install them later on. Now google the driver and download it before moving on to the next step.
- Right-click on the Wi-Fi driver and select Uninstall driver.
- From the new dialog box, select Attempt to remove the driver for this device, and click the Uninstall button.
The driver will be uninstalled in a few seconds. Make sure you give your PC a reboot before you start installing the driver with the setup you downloaded.
Reinstall your Wi-Fi drivers through Windows Update
While the above method works most of the time, on the rare occasion that you can’t install the driver from the setup you’d downloaded above, you can use the Windows Update feature.
We’ve covered something similar in our different ways to update drivers in the past. Give it a look if it seems fancy.
But back to reinstalling the driver first. Don’t worry about connectivity issues. When you reboot your PC after uninstalling the Wi-Fi driver by the above method, your Windows will use a stopgap driver for the meanwhile. So you can use the Windows Update feature without hiccups.
Now, to get started, go to the Start menu search bar, type in ‘settings,’ and select the best match. In the Settings menu, select Windows Update. From there, click on Check for Updates.
The Windows will start looking for fresh updates from Microsoft, and along with them, it will also download the updated Wi-Fi drivers.
Reinstall Wi-Fi drivers in Windows PC
A functioning and updated Wi-Fi driver is a crucial requirement for stable internet connection. We hope one of the methods above did the trick for you, and your internet is running smoothly now.
