System tower · floor
Unplugging the box is where why is my wifi not working usually ends up, and it is the fourth step in Microsoft’s own list rather than the first. Doing it first throws away the information that would have told you whether it was going to help. There are three quite different faults behind this sentence, and two of them announce themselves before you touch anything.
The first announcement is the icon in the corner of the screen. Microsoft documents what each one means, and the difference between two of them is the difference between an evening’s work and a phone call to your provider.
Microsoft: “You’re connected to Wi-Fi and the Internet. You should be in good shape.”
If you see this and things still do not work, the agency of the fault has moved: “the problem might be with a specific app or website or a firewall blocking your Internet connection.” Nothing on this page will fix that, because nothing on this page is broken.
Microsoft: “Your device doesn’t have an Internet connection.” The Wi-Fi part worked — your device joined — and the part beyond the router did not.
This is the state people describe as “the Wi-Fi is not working” when the Wi-Fi is working perfectly and the line into the building is down.
That distinction is the one worth carrying away from this floor. Wi-Fi and the internet are two separate things joined at the router. The Wi-Fi is the stretch between your device and the box; the internet is everything past it. A phone that says it is connected but loads nothing is telling you the first part worked. Restarting the phone will not help, because the phone is not the part that has stopped.
Microsoft’s sixth step, and the one worth doing sixth-from-first. It costs one trip to another room and it
halves the problem: either every device in the house is off, in which case stop touching the laptop
and go and look at the router — or it is one device, in which case the router is innocent and
restarting it will disconnect everybody else for nothing.“On another laptop or phone, try to connect to the same network. If you can connect,
the source of the problem is likely due to your device.”
If the second device also fails, the fault is on the network side and the restart is worth doing — but in the order Microsoft gives, which has more in it than pulling a plug.
Restarting the box, in Microsoft’s order
The reason to follow that as written is that it describes two machines rather than one. Microsoft frames restarting them as something that “helps create a new connection to your Internet service provider”, and then carves out the households where the sequence does not apply: “If you have a cable modem/Wi-Fi router combo device, you only need to follow the steps for the single device.” That exception is the clearest sign that where there are two boxes, the numbering is doing work.
And the thing that explains the two networks with almost the same name. Microsoft:
“Many consumer Wi-Fi routers broadcast at two different network frequency bands: 2.4 GHz and
5 GHz. These will appear as separate networks in the list of available Wi-Fi networks.” So the entry you have been ignoring for two years with a 5 at the end of its name is not a
neighbour’s. It is your own router, offering the other band. Microsoft’s advice when one of them
will not behave is simply to “try connecting to the other network”, which costs nothing and is a
good deal quicker than unplugging anything.
If the problem is one device rather than the network, Microsoft’s step is the one that feels like giving ground rather than fixing anything: forget the network and rejoin it. Settings, Network & internet, Wi-Fi, Manage known networks, select it, Forget — then reconnect and type the password again. It is worth knowing where that password is before you start, because forgetting a network is exactly the moment you discover you never knew it.
Two further steps exist for the stubborn cases, and they are worth naming so you know they are there rather than reaching for them early. Microsoft lists five commands, run in order as administrator, that “manually reset the TCP/IP stack, release and renew the IP address, and flush and reset the DNS client resolver cache”. And after those, uninstalling the network adapter driver and restarting, which Windows follows by installing the latest one — an approach Microsoft explicitly ties to a symptom: “consider this approach if your network connection stopped working properly after a recent update.”
That last clause does something the rest of the page does not: it tells you when to reach for a step rather than how to perform it. If everything was fine on Tuesday and wrong on Wednesday, what changed on Tuesday night is a better question than any of the eight steps.
The floors below take it four ways: reading the icon, deciding whether it is you or the network, restarting properly, and the fixes that apply to one machine only.
Four ways in.
Before any fix, the free diagnosis. Windows distinguishes being on the network from having an internet connection, and they fail for different reasons.
A second device settles which half of the problem you have — and stops you disconnecting the whole household for a fault on one laptop.
Two machines, not one, and an order that matters. Also the step people repeat pointlessly because a battery kept the modem alive.
The fault that travels with the laptop. These floors cover the resets that touch nothing else on the network, in the order Microsoft puts them.
It will not tell you to restart the router first. Microsoft puts it fourth, it disconnects everybody in the building, and half the time the fault is on one device.
It will not treat Wi-Fi and the internet as the same thing. They fail separately, the icon says which, and reading it first is free.
And it will not recommend a signal booster before the diagnosis. A weak signal and a dead line look identical from an armchair and are fixed by entirely different purchases. What holds instead is simple: the icon meanings, the second-device test, the restart order and the network commands are quoted from Microsoft’s own troubleshooting documentation, listed below.
Founder and editor of AI Tools Primer, writing from Palermo, Italy. Thirty-five years of taking computers apart, starting with a Commodore 64 — the long version is on the about page.
Something wrong on this page? Write to aitoolsprimer@gmail.com and it gets fixed.
Written on 22 August 2026.
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