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Wifi not working on laptop when power cable plugged in

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Please help!

There was a power outage in my apartment last night and my laptop was plugged in at the time. Now when my power cable is plugged into my laptop I cant receive wifi!! Ive double checked and whenever the laptop is just running on batteries it can receive wifi. This is so weird and Im worried the power outage broke something inside my laptop.

The laptop is am Acer Aspire 5100 and the wifi is a Linksys router.

Thankyou, thank you, thank you in advance!

Tania

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In reply to Wifi not working on laptop when power cable plugged in

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strange

In reply to Wifi not working on laptop when power cable plugged in

thats a very strange problem you have there 😛

the first thing i would do is remove the wifi adapter from control panel-system-device manager-network adapters

restart windows and let it reinstall itself.

if you plug the power in and its still not working, then i guess you could have damaged the laptop with a power surge. I would say the cheapest option for you if its older than a year is to buy a USB wireless adapter, you can get them for under ?10 now from http://www.ebuyer.com 🙂

Power Surge

In reply to Wifi not working on laptop when power cable plugged in

Since your wireless connection functions on batteries, the adapter in the laptop is most likely functioning.

That leaves the power supply and your router.

I presume your Acer has an external power adapter with a round DC plug that connects to the laptop.

Start by having a technician measure the output voltage of your power adapter. Both with a load and open circuit. If the output voltage is high, or there is a lot of high frequency noise on the DC voltage, the power adapter is bad.

If the power adapter test good, I would try a different wireless network. At a friends, or a cafe where you can try it with and without the power plugged in.

If everything works fine on another network, then I would check or replace the router.

If you have the same problem on another network, then I suspect that when the power came back on a surge damaged the filter circuits in the power adapter.

Unless the surge sent a large spike through the power adapter into the laptop, I suspect that the damage is contained to the power adapter or your router.

Chas

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