Wireless Driver disconnected

[scarborough]

I bought an hp pavilion laptop a little over a year ago for my family's business, and in the past year I've had half a dozen times where it loses all internet capability. I bought the same laptop for my own personal use, so I can compare the two, and when I go into settings > network and internet >advanced network settings I can see that the working laptop shows multiple network adapters (including bluetooth and wifi) and the other is missing most of them. I've tried doing a network reset, multiple restarts, etc., which don't seem to do anything, but so far the problem has resolved itself after a few days. 

But it did it again a few days ago and I started exploring more ways to fix it - I found a video on the hp support website that showed how to open the device manager in control panel and look at the network drivers. I had to tell it to show hidden drivers in order to see the driver, and when comparing I noticed that my working laptop has a "realtek" driver and the other has a "mediatek" driver. (I don't know the difference, but I don't know if that could be part of the issue.)

There was also an Express VPN tap adapter - I don't use Express VPN, I think there was just a free trial when I got the computer. So I uninstalled that, thinking it might be causing a problem. 

When I looked at the properties for the Mediatek driver, it said "disconnected (code 45)" several articles said I could just uninstall it and then hit "scan for hardware changes" and it would reinstall it, but that didn't work, and I now have no idea how to reinstall it. 

At this point my only (very uneducated) theory is that something is wrong in the actual hardware of the computer and I probably need to take it to someone who can work on that, but since I live in a rural area that's not easy to find so if anyone has any other ideas I should try first that would be great. Thanks!