What should you do if your Windows 10 laptop fails to connect to any website? With the same problem in both Chrome and Microsoft Edge?
Suppose, like me, you’ve rebooted your laptop several times, rebooted your home broadband wireless router, and also tried connecting to websites over the cellular SIM that is built into the laptop. All with no avail. What next?
You’d probably, like me, run the Windows Network Diagnostics tool. But what if that fails to report any problems?
That was the situation I was in last night. My laptop had been off the network for a while, as it rendered a 14GB MP4 file from recordings from yesterday’s London Futurists event. (This one, if you’re curious.) But when I was ready to upload the file to YouTube, I hit the connection problem.
As it happens, my laptop is a bit over six years well. It has served me well. But it gets pretty hot from time to time – especially when processing videos. I started to suspect that the heat may have damaged an internal connector. That’s despite the fact that the BIOS diagnostics tests gave the machine a clean bill of health.
I even spent some time disabling anti-virus software. That didn’t make any difference. Nor did leaving the laptop alone, switched off for six hours to cool down as I slept.
At this stage I was beginning to plan the process of buying a new laptop. I went to press the Windows “Shut down” button one more time. I noticed that the button actually said “Update Windows and Shut down”.
Well, I hadn’t been expecting any Windows update. Three days earlier, I’d already been through a very lengthy process of installing something called “Windows 10 Creators Update” – a process I’d accepted on the prompting of messages sent to me by Microsoft through my laptop.
(Did I say ‘lengthy’? A one point during that Creators Update my laptop had displayed a screen for more than two hours saying something like “This will take a while”. The percentage done indicator stayed at 1% for a full 15 minutes, before ticking up to 2%.)
This second update, which took place this morning, also took ages. I stared at my laptop as it warned me, “Getting Windows ready. Don’t turn off your computer”.
After around 30 minutes, I was almost ready to ignore the advice. Before reaching for the hardware reset button, though, I decided to attend to some other household tasks. By the time I returned to my laptop, it was inviting me to log in. Twenty minutes later, I was back online. Chrome was showing me webpages again. Hooray!
In short, my guess is that Microsoft was doing some kind of mass software download to my laptop, at the time I was trying to connect to websites, and for some reason, the Microsoft traffic was exclusively prioritised higher than mine. Too bad that the diagnostic tool gave no inkling of what might be happening.
I notice a recent headline in The Register: “Don’t install our buggy Windows 10 Creators Update, begs Microsoft”. The sub-headline follows up:
We’ll give it to you when it’s ready – and it is not.
My own experience seems to back up that message: the new software can struggle on older hardware.
Windows 10 users take note!
As a postscript, the YouTube video is now available:
dw2 
Leave a Reply