Wireless NIC completely missing

[gilm0re3]

So I'm helping my sister troubleshoot her HP laptop on W10. She got a critical process died bsod and now her wireless card is completely gone. We tried looking in both wireless adapter settings and device management to see if the card is at least recognized by the computer, eveb if it isnt working and it is literally nowhere to be found. She says she hasn't downloaded or installed anything and we already tried to run malware bytes to see if it was a virus (none were found) and also tried running disk error correction which located some file corruption but only was able to repair some. Ethernet still seems to be present, but we haven't tested it to see if it works because we can't right now, and my sister says that her wifi was taking a few minutes to start after waking the computer from sleep for the past few weeks. The laptop is an HP Pavilion T15 and the wireless card is a Realtek RTL 8188EE. So is this just a case of a dead wireless card, or is their something Windows-wise that needs to be fixed? Thanks!

[laquine]

You could try reseating the wifi card and see if that helps. If that doesn't help it could be a corruption in the windows system or worst case scenario is that the card is slowly dying, however you can find an intel wifi card for relatively cheap that are actually quite good.

[gilm0re3]

On 4/4/2016 at 11:26 AM, laquine said:

You could try reseating the wifi card and see if that helps. If that doesn't help it could be a corruption in the windows system or worst case scenario is that the card is slowly dying, however you can find an intel wifi card for relatively cheap that are actually quite good.

I should have sent a response sooner. I apologize for that. Her wifi card is working normally again. Just in case anyone has the same issue in the future, I will explain what we found that solved the issue:

Turns out the problem was software related somehow; my guess is that Windows update is the culprit this time. My sister plugged in ethernet to see if that was still working, and the wifi card became recognized again. She still wasn't able to use the card, but it was at least recognized by the computer. I had her try to find if there were any driver updates for her wireless nic and there were, and after installing the latest driver the wifi card started functioning normally again. So if you are having the same issue, try to plug into ethernet and download the latest driver for you wireless card, and it should function normally again.

[gamerking]

did she just update to windows 10 or was it an update i ran into the forced 10 crap and it bricked my internet on my pc  

its good that you got it working

[gilm0re3]

13 hours ago, gamerking said:

did she just update to windows 10 or was it an update i ran into the forced 10 crap and it bricked my internet on my pc  

its good that you got it working

She's been on Windows 10 since the day it came out. It must have just been a Windows patch that had incompatibilities with her specific hardware.

[laquine]

3 hours ago, gilm0re3 said:

She's been on Windows 10 since the day it came out. It must have just been a Windows patch that had incompatibilities with her specific hardware.

I've had the same problem in the past with my HP laptop. Windows 10 crippled it, and i had to reinstall windows 7. Not to say that I hate windows 10, I run it on my main rig as well as several other PCs but when it comes to brand name laptops that were made before windows 10, sometimes it just doesnt work. Glad you were able to find a fix with the ethernet though.