Question Cleaned dust from computer, now i have no internet access on it ?

[potatomachine]

i am typing on my phone because i have no internet on my computer, nevertheless i will try to provide as much background as possible even at the risk of including irrelevant details.

there is a TL;DR at the bottom

i have a windows 8 desktop pc that is 9 years old at this point and it has been working fine until this week. i was looking throught task manager and noticed a program with an unfamiliar icon "microsoft edge webview2" i had never used microsoft edge so i went to end task but it wouldnt let me end the task, so i did the next best thing and uninstalled it all together. nothing bad happened immedietly after doing this so i have no way of being sure that the next problem is dirrectly related.

however the next day while talking on discord, with stellaris running in the background my computer had a soft crash. stellaris has always made my pc sound like a vacuum cleaner so i thought i just overworked it. i dowloaded a core temp software and decided that before anything else i should try cleaning the pc of dust as that couldnt possibly hurt.

i took the whole pc apart and made sure to drain the caps by holding down the power button for 20 seconds because i intended to clean the dust in the psu as well. i took photos of the interior before unplugging anything so that when it came time to put it back together i would know what went where. when i put it all back together however i ran into two issues immedietly.

i couldnt connect to the internet, and in task manager there were now crazy spikes in disk usage that came and went randomly just on idle.

i have a usb antenna plugged in that i use to connect to WiFi. because i live in an appartment complex i typically see a list of many WiFi networks not only my own, but after cleaning my pc i no longer see any networks at all, not even my own. i know there is nothing wrong with my router because all other devices connect to WiFi just fine, its only this computer.

my first thought was maybe there is something wrong with the usb port for my antenna so i tried a different slot. no change. the next thing i did was take the computer appart again and double check that everything is in the right place and snuggly secure. no change.

i tried removing the network and adding it again
i tried running a troubleshooter. it told me
"hamachi doesn't have a valid ip configuration"
i went down that rabbit hole and i even got the WiFi almost working but it was only ever 2 bars of signal and the WiFi network would constantly disappear. i went in to adater properties and changed the WiFi adapter "interface metric" to 1 and the hamachi adapter "interface metric to 9000 as was recommended on a different forum. i dont know if it ""worked"" or not because i still dont have internet the only thing that changed is when i troubleshoot there are no more "hamachi related messages". sometimes i can see othere wifi networks, sometimes i can even connect to my own wifi but there is no internet. right now i cant see any other wifi networks, and i can't connect to my own wifi network. infact i can no longer see it at all.

TL;DR
-go to clean pc of dust. drain caps.

-boot pc back up now i cant see any WiFi signals

- error "hamachi doesn't have a valid ip config"

-error "the hamachi adapter is disabled"

- i dont even know if ive ever used hamachi

-sometime i can see the WiFi but i cant connect

-sometime i connect but there is no internet or really weak internet

-the router is fine, all other devices have internet

-task manager has random spikes in disk usage

 

[DSzymborski]

With so much random tinkering, the obvious first to do is wipe the OS drive and make a fresh install of Windows and see if it resolves your issues.

 

[potatomachine]

With so much random tinkering, the obvious first to do is wipe the OS drive and make a fresh install of Windows and see if it resolves your issues.

why? the computer works, what doesnt work is the internet. what you're suggesting would wipe my hard drives, that would involve making back ups with external hard drives i dont have

 

[bill001g]

Hamachi if I remember correctly is a site to site vpn software. All vpn software can really make a mess of your machine....not that physically cleaning it would affect that kind of mess. I would try to uninstall it if possible.

Can you test with a ethernet cable even if that means moving the pc temporarily or running a cable across the floor. This would confirm that it is something related to the wifi nic.

Could be the wifi nic was going to die the next time you power cycled your machine and it just happened when you did your cleaning. I guess you could try the nic on another machine.

Another test you could run is to boot a USB linux image. Most have support for common wifi usb chipsets. If this worked it means in your testing process you changed something that made things worse. In these cases reinstalling windows tends to be the fastest or you can dig around to see if you can find what you changed. Windows has the option to reinstall without wiping the drive. You do though have to reinstall the apps but all your data is there. Something like say steam will find all the games and saves after it is reinstalled.

 

[potatomachine]

those are really good suggestions, fortunatly i remembered that i have a different, older antenna that has screw connectors instead of a usb connector like the other antena. and it works like a charm, i have my internet back. why the other antenna doesn't work is a mystery to me.

sadly we're not out of the woods yet. stellaris still crashes my computer, and its not the only game that does. endless space 2 doesnt even finish loading before my computer fans start growling like i've never heard before. this is speculation but based on the sound and location of the angry fan noises i believe its the graphics card. maybe something wrong with the drivers, i dont know. i wouldn't know where to begin.

im contemplating reinstalling webview2 purely out of superstition, it was, after all, the moment things started to go wrong

 

[DSzymborski]

why? the computer works, what doesnt work is the internet. what you're suggesting would wipe my hard drives, that would involve making back ups with external hard drives i dont have

Then you have a massive problem because if you don't have backups, then the question is when, not if, you will lose your data forever.

A fresh OS install on the OS drive is a very basic part of troubleshooting that anyone ought to be prepared to do at any time. If you're not willing to do that, your best bet is to bring your PC into a shop and let them have the headache of figuring out everything that's going on. There's too much going on here -- plus the likelihood this is a *very* old install that's probably a mess now -- to skip basic stuff.

All I can do is wish you good fortune and hope you're quickly able to resolve your PC's current issues.

 

[bill001g]

I think your "antenna" problem is that you actually have 2 different wifi device. You have one built into your motherboard and that is what the screw on antenna hook to. The other thing you call a antenna with a USB connector is a actually a wifi nic that connects via USB. It just happens to have antenna that you can not detach.

Hard to say what the machine did. It generally does not like having 2 wifi nics at the same time. It might have enable the internal nic and disabled the USB one. If you did not have antenna on the motherboard nic it would get bad signals.

Although it doesn't always tell you why maybe the event viewer will have a log entry for the time you crash that gives you a clue.

I would load something like hwinfo and watch the cpu and gpu temps. You might have something like a fan not running at the proper speeds.

 

[whynotme]

Is it maybe time for a whole new PC? I mean, 9 years old? It was never meant to run that long, and certainly not meant to be able to handle today's computing demands. I'm not surprised gaming crashes your pc. And for all that is holy, please make some backups!