Network settings crash settings app, wifi and Ethernet not working or appearing

Question

Came home from work yesterday and the pc won’t connect to internet at all. Gf says nothing unusual happened during the day. No wifi on the task bar (twice I’ve managed to make it appear, once when I disabled and enabled the wifi driver, and once when I ran sfc scannow, but trying to select it just makes it look for networks unsuccessfully forever until I restart and then it vanishes again).

settings takes a long time (several minutes) to load, but seems functional except for network settings. Whenever I select those, it hangs for a long time then crashes.

usually we use wifi but I tried plugging in to Ethernet (which tbf I haven’t tested before so possibly is broken for unrelated reasons). Pc doesn’t seem to notice any change.

my best guess is update broke something, but I can’t revert afaik because I can’t download anything while disconnected. Wifi network itself is fine btw, I’m using it to write this from my phone.

please help!

Answer 1

Of the suggestions the AI made, the one I haven’t attempted yet is uninstalling the network drivers. I’ve read that there should be backups on the PC already but I’m not sure how to verify that, and if I don’t have the driver and can’t connect to the internet to download it, I’m worried I’ll be fully locked out without manually transferring the files via a separate device.

Answer 2

Hi, I'm Mite and here to help.

You can use the command line to reset the network. It might help because there might be some wrong network settings causing the network not to work. Here are the steps:

1. Press the Windows key + R, type "cmd", and press Ctrl+Shift+Enter to run Command Prompt as an administrator.
2. Execute the following commands in order, pressing Enter after each one: netsh winsock reset netsh int ip reset ipconfig /flushdns netcfg -d (This command removes and reinstalls all network adapters, which might fix the missing options)
3. Restart your PC after running all commands.

Answer 3

I'm glad to hear that the problem has been solved. If you still have any issues, don't hesitate to ask.