Fix for Windows 8 unresponsive/disabled Network Wireless Adapter (Solution for non-opening connections list)

[Dwn4BassAlan]

So my laptop randomly decided to stop connecting to wifi when I woke it up from sleep mode. And no matter how many clicks I tried on the icon in the bottom right corner, or "connect to a network" in the control panel, the list WOULD NOT OPEN. Nothing ever happened. Completely 100% unresponsive. I tried all the regular windows diagnostics and of course nothing was wrong supposedly.

I haven't seen many agreeing options online, so I'll post this in case anyone else has the issue and this might work. Instead of going into BIOS and doing anything too complicated or time consuming. It looks like a lot of people have had this problem.

So I finally figured it out after about an hour of trying to get it to work through a bunch of different things. (going to control panel did not work: looking at the devices, mine showed a bluetooth, ethernet, and wifi, and the wifi was disabled and even though I clicked enable 5 times and it always said that it worked, the thing stayed disabled) (rebooting also did not work)

This is what worked:

-Went to device manager (through control panel), found my wireless adapter and right click>properties>power management>UNCHECKED the box that says "allow computer to turn off device to save power">saved an exited. Tried to open it up and it still didn't work yet.

-So I went back to control panel and tried to enable it again, and it said "enabling....enabled" but again it still did not work.

-Then I went to reboot and it would not shut down fully, did a force shut down, restarted in normal mode, and it finally let me open the list again to choose a network, clicked and connected. Works fine now.

[k3n12ock]

Must be a Dell because mines did that too. The network card eventually died and I had to buy a usb one.

[Dwn4BassAlan]

it's a lenovo but google searches showed that basically all types seem to do it. I think it more of an OS thing than the pc make.