From the course: Help Yourself: Tech Tips Weekly

Troubleshooting the network connection

From the course: Help Yourself: Tech Tips Weekly

Troubleshooting the network connection

- [Instructor] Windows offers you an initial clue that something is amiss with the network even before you might suspect a problem exists. Look at the task bar in the notification area. Now if you don't see all the icons, click this up-pointing chevron and you'll see the rest of them, but what you're looking for is the network connection icon. This one shown here, which looks like a fork next to a monitor is the wired network connection icon. The WiFi icon is used for wireless connections, but either way, when there's a network issue, you see the icon is presented here. The red X means the network isn't up. Now in this case, I've unplugged the network cable, so it's an easy fix. There. Similarly a yellow triangle may indicate that the network seems okay but the internet connection is down. For this situation as well as other networking issues, the solution is to right-click the networking icon and choose troubleshoot problems. Windows runs some diagnostics, and you can continue to work through the troubleshooter, obeying the prompts as they're presented. Generally speaking, the most common fix windows can do is to reset the network interface card or NIC. For network connections, this is the best you can do on your computer. Otherwise, you can troubleshoot the network itself. By the way, the network status screen in the settings app is another useful network troubleshooting resource. To get there quickly, right click the networking icon again, but choose open network in internet settings. Here in the settings app, you can quickly review the network status. The local area connection is active. For a wireless connection you'd see the name the WiFi network listed here. This network is private. It's my home office network. And internet access is up and running. Other useful items present themselves on this screen. In fact, the last item on the list, one of them, is network reset. This is where the troubleshooter most often leads you, as I mentioned earlier. Choose this item to restart the PC's network card, and hopefully that fixes whatever connection issues your computer might have.

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