Wi Fi Connection Puzzle

I have a wifi network with three possible APs. It's reliable and various devices with differing OSs from different manufacturers connect with no problems BUT...
my 3 year old Toshiba Satellite Win 10 (all up-to-date) suddenly stopped connecting "automatically" to any of the APs about three months ago. It "sees" the APs and will manually connect with no problems (remembering the log-in details without my input) but coming out of "sleep" mode or sometimes rebooting, won't connect automatically when once it did.

Nothing has changed that I'm aware of.

This is hardly a crisis but it is annoying! Any ideas where to look?

Thanks in advance.

 

PS the network device (Intel Dual Band Wireless - AC7260) has the most up-to-date driver (Jan 2018) from Intel.

 

3 AP's.....wow!
Do you want to auto-connect to a specific AP, or just anyone which presents the strongest signal from the clients location?

Click on the network symbol on the bottom right of your client system tray, and make sure that the SSID for the AP in question has a check mark in the box that says "Auto-Connect"

 

as far as sleep mode, try disabling power control on the wifi - always keep it powered (connected) then you won't have to reconnect.

 

They are all set up to autoconnect so as I move about I should be able to connect to the strongest signal. That's how it used to work

Have done already. Have even had the system "forget" the APs so I could re-set them to auto connect. No change.

 

Yeh it sounds like it could be an issue with the windows client and its roaming ability, rather than the AP's themselves.

Have you recently updated any network drivers? (ie NIC) or it could be that some drivers have been auto-updated with Win10 updates on the Toshiba Sat, and are now holding onto associations longer?

Open Device Manager and right click on the NIC your laptop uses - advanced tab - roaming sensitivity levels, set it to high.
This may help?

 

Wouldn't hurt to also check in the 'Local services' directory within windows, scroll down to 'Network connected devices-auto setup', and make sure that service is running on the client.

 

Updated driver a couple of days ago. Made no difference to the situation.

Thanks for the suggestion, but sadly this didn't work either.

 

Thanks but this didn't work.

 

Can you give me more hints about how to do this in WIN10, please?

 

Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network Connections, on the left side of the screen click Change Adapter Settings.
Right click on the WiFi select Properities and then click configure. Last tab has Power Management.

 

Thanks, but the only option here is "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" which is already unchecked... there are two more sub options about waking the computer which are greyed-out under since the main option is not selected.

 

Check the option "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power".

Its my guess the updated driver probably expects to turn the NIC back on after sleep or from a fresh boot, and because the option is turned off, its possibly toggling the "switch" from being already on, to off.

 

Done as you've suggested... so far so good. Thanks! I'll give it a day or so to see if it holds.

 

YEP nearly a week and the computer now connects to the AP every time without my intervention.
Thanks again. SOLVED