Hp Pavillion P7-1267b - wi-fi, options, menu are gone everywhere

[dd1509]

Hi all,
Helping a neighbor. She said wi-fi was working fine for months and suddenly, Wi-Fi is not showing in the task bar, none of the menus indicate wi-fi at all and one menu I looked at said it was either missing or not available.

In the Network setting dialog box, only lists Ethernet as a device, no wi-fi. So, we plugged in the ethernet and it worked fine on a cable but it is temporarily in the middle of the living room, (where the router is) where she does not want it, prefers it is in the original spot in her office.

Router seems to be working fine, can get wireless signal on her phone, my phone, etc.

I believe this HP desktop has wi-fi on the mother board as well. Device manager says Realtek Pcie Gbe Family Controller.

From my reading this on-board card may only be ethernet? Therefore, I am assuming there must be a wi-fi chip on the motherboard as well. There are no large PCI cards in the computer. There are no antennas visible at all.
I do not see anything for Wi-Fi devices in Device Mgr. or anywhere else.

I was concentrating on upgrading the drivers on the Realtek, appears that it found a driver dated 2015. Not sure what it was previously but Windows appeared to update. But no Wi-Fi anything, anywhere. Again, this card may not be the source of wi-fi.

I even opened the desktop to see if there was maybe a PCI card that become un-connected but nothing there at all. So, must be a chipset on the motherboard??

Assuming the Realtek On-Board chipset is only Ethernet, I did not try to uninstall it and see if Windows found it.
I saw some posts indicating maybe I needed to go into the Bios and see if some card or whatever was stuck in there and not recognized.

Any thoughts?

Thx DD

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

If the PC's wifi was working fine and just quit, most likely the wifi card has died and needs to be replaced.

The fact that you only see the Realtek ethernet adapter listed under the Network Adapters device manager category pretty much confirms that.

The product specs for the PC does indicate that it did come with wifi.

https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c03135832

The easiest thing to do to fix the problem would be to purchase an external USB dual band AC wifi adapter.