Weird internet connectivity issues

[Vanavel she/her]

I have a PC (a 2-year old Asus laptop) and it has started behaving rather oddly over the past few days. I'll be using the internet and everything seems fine, but suddenly it loses the connection. When I click on the wireless thing at the bottom of the screen, it only shows the network I was connected to and says there is "limited access" or something like that. If I try disconnecting in order to reconnect, it then shows that there are no networks available. I've tried running the troubleshooter, but it can't fix it. I've tried disable and re-enabling the Intel Wireless thingy, but that stops responding as soon as I click either "disable" or "enable". If I end that program through task manager, then the change will have taken place. However, if I then try to re-enable it, it stops responding again.

 

The only thing I have found to be effective is to turn off the computer (and I almost always end out having to manually turn it off), restart it, and run the troubleshooter. Then it says something was turned off, it fixes it, and it works fine until the whole process starts again.

 

I just took a 3-hour online exam and had to restart the computer 2 or 3 times. I have two more exams tomorrow and I'm not sure what else to try or where to take it. Any advice would be appreciated!

 

 

Oh! And I think the internet connection might last longer if I am using it fairly frequently, but I am not sure if that is the case or it is just random. 

[Vanavel she/her]

It is also possible I am exacerbating the problem. It just happened again and I skipped straight to the restarting stage (since the other stages haven't yielded any results today), and it connected automatically when it started back up. Of course, it still required restarting work.

Edited May 22, 2014 by Vanavel

[Eerongal he/him]

Sounds like there's probably an issue with the wireless adapter in the machine. If possible, i would try updating your wireless driver, that could fix it. if it doesn't, it may be a hardware issue. In theory, you could just buy an external wireless adapter and use that one instead, those are fairly cheap.

[Vanavel she/her]

I had a feeling it might be a hardware issue. I tried updating it and it said it was up to date. Thank you for the recommendation, though! I hadn't thought of the possibility of getting an external wireless adapter!