WiFi Light Remained Orange - Unable to Connect to SSID

[Xaeriee]

My WiFi was working fine Friday, and per logs it was working fine sat/sun . The only changes that occurred was 1 update installed yesterday morning (Windows Defender update - KB915597) and the battery lost power late last night after it was left in sleep mode without being connected to a power source.

• I've powered it on today and noticed it was not connecting to my WiFi.
• The WiFi button (not a FN button with the F keys but rather an actual button next to the speaker on/off button) was illuminated orange and does not toggle on/off or change color.** (see ** below)
• The speaker button next to the wifi button toggles fine. The light changes as intended after being pressed and the status icons clearly changes after the button is toggled.
• I tried a combination of keys for grins, FN + wifibutton, CTRL + wifibutton, ALT+wifibutton, WinKey+wifibutton
• The network icon in the status bar keeps spinning with the blue circle and eventually stops, then shows what appears to be an 8 pointed orange star, the icon says "Not connected - Connections are available".
• When attempting to manually select my wireless network it says, "Windows was unable to connect to 'mySSID'." I tried the "Troubleshoot problems" wizard but it did not resolve the issues.
• Only 4 updates available and they are for my Office product. Updates were installed yesterday automatically
• WiFi shows strength as Excellent works for other devices,  WPA2-PSK,  802.11.

I tried each of these without success:

1. Disabling the wifi adatper and re-enabling
2. Unchecking the box in device's power management to allow the computer to turn off the device to save power
3. Restarted
4. Checking if ethernet works - yes
5. Right clicking device and checking for updates while on Ethernet - none found
6. Checking to see if other devices can connect to my wifi without issues - yes
7. Removing all wireless network connections and attempting to connect as fresh new connection
8. Disabling all network adapters and trying to connect after reconnecting each one
9. CMD as admin > netsh int ip reset resetlog.txt all resets said "OK!" > restarted > and the light returned to its normal white color but now continues to cycle through "getting information from SSID > connecting > Windows was unable to connect to SSID."
   
10. Ran Windows Network Diagnostic again - it suggested the same things from before and did not help resolve and stated "Problem with wirewless adapter or access point - Detected" Exploring additional options does not help.
11. CMD as admin > netsh winsock reset > Sucessfully reset
12. Cleared and rescanned my device list on router
13. Restarted router
14. Disabled and enabled wifi adapter (again)

Any reccommendations on where to proceed? At this point I feel like I'll just be doing the same things over and over again.

[REO51ST]

Welcome to the HP Support Community @Xaeriee

HP Notebook System BIOS Update:

https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/selfservice/swdetails/hp-elitebook-840-g3-notebook-pc/7815294/s...

The update may not have anything to do with your problem but the list of Fixes is just so long???

Click on Revision History.

REO

[Xaeriee]

Thank you for the link and your help @REO51ST

It's still cycling through failing to connect to WiFi.

I downloaded the exe on my usb, ran it as 'adminitrator' on my laptop, followed the prompts, said yes to create a recovery partition  and it errored out here stating "HPBISUPDREC: An error occurred when creating the recovery partition: 0x102."

Clcking 'OK' gave me another prompt saying, "WARNING: Your current Intel Active Management Technology firmware is affected by a critical sercurity vulnerability. Please updated the firmware and/or implement mitigations immediately. See www.hp.com/go/intelmanageabilityissue for detals."

After clicking ok it will allow me to proceed, it said "This device has BIOS version 01.09 - This utility will update it to version 01.33. I cancelled to check out my disk space." I have 115 GB free. The utility said the recovery partition only needed 5 GB.

After taking time to research online, and time to read about trying in safemode instead, I saw a prompt appear asking what to do with E:. A new partition has appeared as "HP_TOOLS" that was not there before. I tried the exe again and said Yes to All to overwrite exisiting files. I also copied the exe locally to my C: instead of running as admin from the USB. This resolved the errors I received previously.

I was afraid at first because I've never updated a BIOS. The BIOS update stated it was successful and I restarted as prompted. When prompted duing the System Bios Update I selected Update BIOS and allowed it to finish. It stated it was complete. After it finished I retried connecting via WiFi.

It's still cycling through failing to connect to WiFi.

I greatly appreciate your help. I would not have updated the BIOS on my own.

[REO51ST]

@Xaeriee

Glad to hear that it was successful.

There were so many fixes I was not sure if any would help with your problem or not???

Let me do some research and see if I can come up with your next step.

REO

[REO51ST · Accepted solution]

@Xaeriee

First a question for me???

Have you noticed any changes with the laptop after the BIOS update???

Next:

Intel Wireless LAN Drivers

https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/selfservice/swdetails/hp-elitebook-840-g3-notebook-pc/7815294/s...

Intel Management Engine (ME) Firmware Component

https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/selfservice/swdetails/hp-elitebook-840-g3-notebook-pc/7815294/s...

At this point reboot:

Have you tried running "HP Connection Optimizer"

https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/selfservice/swdetails/hp-elitebook-840-g3-notebook-pc/7815294/s...

Do you have a Hidden network:

To connect your Windows computer to a hidden network:

1. Look for the WiFi icon on the lower-right corner of your screen.
2. Click Network settings.
3. Under WiFi is there a Hidden network:???

REO

[Xaeriee]

@REO51ST

I haven't noticed any explicit changes standing out to me although I did find a handful of new "Unknown Device" after scanning for hardware changes that I'm certain weren't there before. I don't know how accurate the install date is in the driver info but it suggests today after I did the BIOS update. One refers to "Location 0: (Port_#0008.Hub_#0001) - USB/VD_138A&PID_003F&REV_0104", another "Location: on Pci Bus - ACPI\HPQ6007", another "Location: on Pci Bus - ACPI\INT344B", another "Location: 36 - (very very long HardwareID)

I'm running Windows 7 64bit.

Earlier I tried using the HP support page where it first says it requires to identify my product. If fails to identify my product though. It made me download the HPSupportSolutionsFramework-12.8.47.1 to do this. So instead I manually entered my SN and selected every software/driver under the sun for my laptop under the Network Drivers section.

I'll download the HP Connection Optimizer along with everything else you mentioned too. I'll do this one by one so we can find what fixes it! Thank you again for your time I'll get back here when all of this is completed.

[REO51ST]

@Xaeriee

I just edited the Intel Wireless LAN Drivers above.

Use the new one.

Synaptics WBF Fingerprint Driver:  USB/VD_138A&PID_003F

https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/selfservice/swdetails/hp-elitebook-840-g3-notebook-pc/7815294/s...

HP 3D DriveGuard Drier:   ACPI\HPQ6007

https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/selfservice/swdetails/hp-elitebook-840-g3-notebook-pc/7815294/s...

Intel Chipset Installation Utility:   ACPI\INT344B

https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/selfservice/swdetails/hp-elitebook-840-g3-notebook-pc/7815294/s...

REO

[Xaeriee]

Even after all the changes it still exhibited the same behavior. I  began to rule out any potential OS or disk corruption by performing scanning/repairing.

Thinking about the series of events, it seemed like nothing was changed on my laptop that could have caused this so I started to look into the radio types supported on my router/laptop and started looking into changes I could find from my ISP (thinking they did something without notice as they have in the past).

I got to a point where I decided to unplug the router and leave it sitting for a bit (probably 30 min), ate some dinner, returned, and viola, instant connect...

Thank you so much REO51ST for your time and help today. You've been quick to respond, very good at helping sift through the potential causes, and your solutions were easy to follow. I greatly appreciated the time you took to help me through this. Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU! Huge plus now my laptop feels 110% up to date 🙂

Edit: If I'd had hotspot available on my phone I would have tried that to help isolate the issue 😞  but I don't.