Windows Tools, Help & Guides

You may have experienced that from time to time your Wireless Connection just stops working or you get disconnected. Usually this is fixed by right-Clicking the WLan icon in the Tray and choose Troubleshoot.

What this does amongst other things is to reset your wireless connection using the ipconfig release and renew feature. And usually it will do the trick.

But if this is a reoccurring problem that means something else is wrong.

Your TCP/IP protocol might be corrupted and needs resetting. This is for some reason something you need to do yourself and (as far as I know) not being done by the Troubleshooter.

NETSH command

In earlier windows versions resetting the TCP/IP was done by a simple command-line tool called Netsh. Like this:

netsh int ip reset resetlog.txt

This command resets the TCP/IP protocols to default settings. However trying the same command in Windows 7 will only get you an error message. There are two main reasons for this.

First off the commands INT and IP are no longer present. The INT command is now known as INTERFACE.

Secondly; With the introduction of the new IP-address system ipv6 you now have to specify which IP protocol you want to reset (ipv4 or ipv6).

Therefore in order to manually reset your TCP/IP in Windows 7 you have to:

1. Open an elevated Command prompt (Right Click CMD.EXE and choose Run as administrator)
2. Type one of the following:
   netsh interface ipv4 reset
netsh interface ipv6 reset
3. Restart your Computer.

So there you have it.

In an upcoming article I’ll bring you more tips on how to manually deal with problematic Wireless connections. Until then,  get yourself outside and get some sun on your pale computer geek body. No offense, but you do seem to need it ;-)

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