NOVEMBER 2015:
OVERVIEW:
I purchased an Acer Switch 10E 2-in-1 Tablet when back in New Zealand to complete the Sale Of My House. I was disappointed with the Asus Transformerbook T100 that I had purchased for the first part of My Travels.
As a side note, I am much happier with the Acer Switch.
The Acer Switch came with Windows 8. After first boot-up and configuration, Windows Update upgraded me to Windows 8.1
After Windows 8.1 had FULLY INSTALLED (with about 5 cycles of updates!), I chose to upgrade further to Windows 10 (for free).
Unlike some, I am reasonably happy with Windows 10 and haven’t had any problems until…
CAN’T CONNECT TO THIS NETWORK:
I have had the Acer Switch since August and I have experienced NO PROBLEMS connecting to networks – until I arrived in Phu Quoc, Vietnam.
It was OK in New Zealand, at airports, in Saigon, on a Mekong Delta Tour, in Rach Gia… but, then, I arrived in Phu Quoc.
At the Lien Hiep Thanh Resort, I couldn’t connect to their network. I put it down to them having a bad network and decided to move to the Nhat Lan Resort (for this and other reasons).
On arrival at Nhat Lan I could connect straight away to their fastest and strongest signal connection (as with many places, they had a few different ones servicing different areas of the resort). I had taken a bungalow next to the strongest signal on purpose so that I could work on this travel blog effectively.
However, the next time that I tried to connect I got the dreaded “Can’t connect to this network” problem. No matter how many times I tried, I couldn’t connect.
I investigated this problem online and found that this is a known problem with Windows 8 (and upwards).
There are many posts that try and address this issue and I experimented with many of the suggestions.
THE FIX:
In the end, this is what worked for me. I won’t go into the technical details, I will just tell you what to do.
Firstly:
Forget the problem network:
- Click on the Network Icon in the bottom right of your screen
- Click on Network Settings
- Click on Manage WiFi Settings
- Scroll down to Manage Known Networks
- If the problem network is listed, Click on it and Click on Forget
- Close all windows and exit out of Network Settings
Secondly:
Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS)… try the easy stuff first:
- Right Click on the Windows Icon in the bottom left of your screen
- Click on Command Prompt (Admin)
- Click on Yes when prompted
- Type IPCONFIG /RELEASE and ENTER
- Type IPCONFIG6 /RELEASE and ENTER
- Type IPCONFIG /RENEW and ENTER
- Type IPCONFIG6 /RENEW and ENTER
- Type EXIT
Try to connect to the problem network again.
If it works, you may want to make things easy for yourself and create an IPreset.BAT file on your desktop that contains these commands. If you do, you can Right Click on the IPreset.BAT file and RUN AS ADMINITRATOR; Click on Yes when prompted.
Thirdly:
If that doesn’t work, try the following:
- Right Click on the Windows Icon in the bottom left of your screen
- Click on Command Prompt (Admin)
- Click on Yes when prompted
- Type netsh advfirewall reset and ENTER
- Type netsh winsock reset and ENTER
- Type netsh int ip reset and ENTER
- Type netsh int ipv4 reset and ENTER
- Type netsh int ipv6 reset and ENTER
- Type EXIT
Restart your machine and try to connect to the problem network again.
If it works, you may want to make things easy for yourself and create a WIFIreset.BAT file on your desktop that contains these commands. If you do, you can Right Click on the WIFIreset.BAT file and RUN AS ADMINITRATOR; Click on Yes when prompted.
Don’t forget to RESTART afterwards.
Fourthly:
It might be worth playing with some of the netsh settings. Try one at a time to see if it helps:
- Right Click on the Windows Icon in the bottom left of your screen
- Click on Command Prompt (Admin)
- Click on Yes when prompted
- Type netsh int tcp set heuristics disabled and ENTER; or
- Type netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled and ENTER; or
- Type netsh int tcp set global rss=enabled and ENTER
- Type EXIT
You can try any, any combination, or all of these netsh commands to get your network running better.
In Conclusion:
It may not always work. Sometimes you need to wait for the Resort to restart their WiFi Router (a power outage does the trick!).
If the WiFi Router is restarted. Try the, above, methods again (as soon as possiblle after the restart – sometimes getting in quickly helps).
Sometimes these fixes don’t work the first time… BUT DO WORK THE SECOND TIME.
Good luck. 🙂