u/Bakugirl21

I’ve been having this problem for a few days now but didn’t realize how serious it was until today.

None of the programs on my PC will recognize the strong wifi it has. Not Steam, not Microsoft Edge, nothing. However, I got Edge to claim once that it was being blocked by the fire wall. Searching about this suggested that an antivirus may be to blame.

The problem is, I can’t even search for anything as the search bar on the bottom kicks me out every time, and if I try to search by clicking the window’s icon, it too will then error out.

The closest culprit I can find is Norton 360 for gamers expired about a week or so ago, and when I look at the icon, it’s only a white page. It’s practically pretending to be uninstalled, but then if I right click on a file and click ‘show more options’, and option for Norton 360 for gamers pops up, but hovering over it only says subscription expired: subscribe. Clicking it results in absolutely nothing.

I’m at a lost because I can’t get into Norton, I can’t get into Windows Defender (only Windows Security and ‘Windows Defender Firewall with Advanced Security’ which apparently isn’t the Windows Defender program I’m supposed to get into) and I can’t bring up Command Prompt for other solutions offered that way.

What’s driving me more crazy is I don’t know how this could have happened. It was working fine the day it went crazy, then I unplugged it from the usual monitor and plugged it into my TV. That’s it. This problem started right after that. (I unplugged an HDMI cord from the Motherboard (guess I panicked plugged that in at start) and didn’t plug it back in for the switch, but I mean, that’s not supposed to be required for casual PC usage anyways, right?)

Does anyone have any idea of something I could do? Or do I need to factory reset my whole PC? (wouldn’t be devastating past needing to reinstall my games. I’ve only had this a few months and have had a lapse of chronic illness throughout, so no important files have been made yet)

It’s been a problem for a couple days that has come out of no where. I went to hook my PC up to my TV (late to do so I know, but it was a rule in my house for a long time not to do so, but I said F it to console subscriptions a couple months ago and just wanted to try my new steam controller)

It booted up fine, however, when I went to connect to wifi, it claimed it saw nothing. (Keep in mind, I was using it earlier in the day just fine) I shrugged and figured I just wanted to test my steam controller anyways and was fine with offline mode (whole different story)

Later on, I checked the wifi settings again and it claimed it saw multiple wifi sources like normal, so I thought ‘great!’ and connected to my usual wifi. However even though it said connected with full bars, all programs I used claimed there was no internet/offline mode. I couldn’t even load a webpage up.

I thought at first maybe it was because I didn’t hook an HDMI cable to my Motherboard (yes, I had THAT problem originally when setting up my first computer 😅 then when setting this one up, I guess I had some issue that I guess plugging it in anyways helped work out. When I plugged into the TV, I saw it there and thought “wtf? But I don’t need that, right? Just need to plug into the GPU, RIGHT???”) but I just tried that with replugging back into my original monitor (tried just using the DPI cable in the GPU at first) and it’s still just the same problem.

Does anyone know wtf is going on? How does it make sense that it sees wifi, says it’s connected, but then none of the programs can access this ‘wifi’??? (Oh yeah, and the house wifi is completely unaffected. Trust me, family of gamers, they’d rage if they couldn’t get wifi 😅)

Edit: I just ran a ‘diagnose network problems’ test, and it says ‘good news, you’re connected’ so I don’t know why none of my programs will recognize the internet then.