I have had an issue recently when connecting to my wireless network without rebooting. The issue came about when I had dropped my wireless connection from my laptop, but when the router had reinitialized, Windows wouldn’t connect to the network.
There could be many times where you could lose your connection, and can’t reconnect to the network without restarting your machine. In this post I’ll talk about two commands you can execute to try and reconnect to your network.
Reconnecting to a Network
While restarting a machine isn’t difficult, you may not want to because of a network disconnect. You may have open files that you need to save, or it may take several minutes to restart your machine. Whatever the reason, there is an alternative to restarting.
In many past posts, I have talked about retrieving your IP address by using a utility called ipconfig. Not only can you retrieve your IP address with this utility, but you can also connect and disconnect from your network using it.
If your machine can’t connect to your network, use the following steps:
- Open up a command prompt by pressing Windows Key+R and type cmd in the dialog box that appears.
- At the command prompt, type ipconfig /release. Wait for the command to complete as it may take some time.
- Once the previous command has finished, type ipconfig /renew to reconnect.
The above process will work with both a wired and wireless network. If you still can’t connect, verify that your router is online.