Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!

I have to be transparent and tell everyone that this is not strictly a Linux related networking question; in fact it is about my little girl's new Christmas laptop we gave her and her Xbox. Her new laptop is Windows 10, but I am asking here because it has been my experience that there is more networking knowledge in this forum than anywhere else on the net. However, if it is inappropriate to seek help here I understand.

We upgraded our ISP package over the summer and received a new high speed router. Our ISP is Virgin and we have been with them for many years, but have always received subpar performance. There are many issues but I am writing here about one specific one I am trying to fix for my little girl.

We have numerous devices connected to the net through this router, including
a Ring door bell and three security cameras, a playstation, three Smart TVs,

About a week ago, we had a sudden power outage which lasted about three hours. I had to reconfigure the wireless on most of the devices, but they all seemed to work once reconfigured, except for her Xbox which would only connect to the wireless extender upstairs with a very weak signal. We gave her a laptop for Xmas and it will not connect to the internet, though it does connect to the router and is assigned a DHCP IP addess. Occassionally, it too will connect to the wifi extender upstairs for a short time then is dropped. All devices are working except these two and they all have the same subnet address and are all DHCP and they all have the same IPv4 DNS server addresses. I've been inside the router settings and see nothing unusual, though admittedly I'm not sure I would find it if something was amiss.

Can anyone suggest anything else I can look for?

Any help very much appreciated.

Bob

I believe my appropriate reply to that season's greeting is: Bah! Humbug! Although I deliver it tongue-in-cheek, as I'm a J.W. and Saturnalia/Christmas is a pretty normal day for us. Most of the more active ones plan trips around the fact that everyone else is doing the same stuff, but we are not.

That aside, the good news is that M$ ripped off the BSD Network stack, so many familiar tools are in there. Get an administrator console open. Use /? instead of --help

The router/modem should pass 2 dns servers to each connection it makes. These are set in the router. It doesn't matter which ones, but opendns.org do some with a family filter which is advisable for kids. You should find them in Windoze 10 menus - properties of the connection or somesuch. Particularly if you can ping an IP but not a name, that's the problem. Opendns.org is on 67.215.70.200 although their dns service is elsewhere.

You may also need to set a default route to the router. That means everything going out is directed there. That might be a problem. The Xbox I know nothing about, although there's plenty online. Let us know how you get on.

Thannk you, business kid. I knew there were networking gurus here. Unfortunately, I was afraid you were going to tell me to open a command prompt, which I can't do on this computer because it's running W10 in S mode which will not allow a console to be opened (some security thing.) I did find from MS help that you can get out of S mode to regular Windows, but once you do you can never go back. I do like the security of knowing she is protected with that so I am hesitant to take it out o S mode.

If there is nothing I can do without a command prompt, I guess this thing is going back (it's only a week old) and it may void any warranty. I thought possibly some router setting might do it, but maybe not. It is using the same DNS servers all of my working connections are using, so I hadn't considered that. It is strange that the extender I have in here bedroom will connect with it to the internet, but the signal outside of her bedroom is so weak it can't be used anywhere else.

I've always been able to somehow fumble my way through any connection problems I have had in the past, but that is usually in Linux or Mac. I loath Windows.

Thank you so much for your help.

Bob

You say you had to configure the wireless after the power outage. You should not have to do that because DHCP renew or discover should have brought it back to life. Without command prompt, can't debug much. I'd delete ALL connection profiles, and even the running one and rebuild it. And I'd make sure that you only have one active interface, because multiple interfaces have a metric or speed parameter that will select it even if it not the preferred path.

On the laptop, you should be able to open the management web page for your router.(if you had tracert/ipconfig/ping, that would be a a better test, those of course only available in a command prompt). If you can't, that is a problem. If the laptop has a wired connection, I would certainly try it directly on the router/switch.

Xbox, same thing. Blow away the network profile and redo it.

There are several ways wireless extenders work, all will reduce throughput by 1/2 (simply how wireless works). Moca extenders, which use an existing cable lines to connect are usually more reliable and quicker. Powerline, I always get varying speeds. But there is no reason it should fail completely.

I did say command prompt (Administrator console = command prompt as admin). There's bound to be some hack for the command prompt. Search.

I am certainly not a windows expert. But I found a link that says how to get a command prompt in Windows 10s:

Just found out how to do it. Go to Recoverv/Advanced Startup. After a restart choose Troubleshoot/Advanced options then Command Prompt. The computer restarts again after which you choose your account to sign into,enter your password and after that a command prompt appears.

Does your router have both 2.4 and 5 GHz and does it use the same SSID for both? Is the extender both 2.4 and 5 GHz. The laptop might not want to switch between 5 and 2.4 as it moves away from the extender. Typically the laptop antenna(s) run up the side of monitor and I've read in the past where people have found the antenna not connected. I also do not understand what you mean by reconfigure the wireless.

One reason I say test wired is to eliminate wifi problems. I know laptops sometimes don't have wired ports, but a USB-C adapter with usb ports + 1G port is really nice to have.

Are the default routes the same for devices and the laptop? If so, there is no reason for this to fail unless there is some security option on the router. Or some mac filtering or parental settings.

Thanks everyone for all your replies and help offered. This turned out to be nightmare for me because of my lack of knowledge in networking. After the ISP tech team went through the router and found nothing that would prevent connection, they convinced me that there was something wrong with the wireless in this laptop. My little girl was becoming more and more sad about the whole thing, so I was finally able to convince the retailer to exchange it for me (which turned out to be a whole other adventure, won't be shopping there again).

When the new one arrives, I feel much better prepared to deal with it if it occurs again.

Because this was a Windows laptop, the experts on this forum had every right to tell me to bug off when I posted, but you haven't and I am grateful and touched by everyone's kindness. I have been a member of this forum for a long time but I have never acquired enough knowledge to be a resource to someone else, but I have certainly been helped over the years. I don't use Windows and have never attempted to learn much about it until now. My little girl wanted Windows because that it what they use at school. I thought my Linux knowledge would be enough to get me through most networking problems, but apparently not.

I am very grateful too every who posted.

Bob