Solved Don’t see WiFi internet option in Network Settings

About 2 years ago I bought a WiFi card for my PC. When we moved my computer wasn’t receiving a decent signal so I had a technical run ethernet cable. Now I need to use WiFi access but all I see available in Network Settings is Ethernet. No WiFi. I thought there might be a setting in BIOS but none that I can find.

I guess my WiFi card might be defective but is there a reason that there’s no WiFi option in Network Settings?

This is probably very basic, but did you check with the hardware manufacturer to see if they had specific drivers?

Open system settings/Network and internet then in the middle of your screen right under ethernet should be Wi-Fi with a toggle for on and off

By default, Windows tries to use Ethernet on systems that have both an Ethernet adapter and a WiFi adapter available. So only if it sees Ethernet not working (or disabled) it will try to use WiFi and will switch back to Ethernet the moment when it sees Ethernet working again. It's possible to change this behavior by changing the device priority levels, but by far the easiest way IMO is to just go in Network Connections window (press Win+R to open the Run dialog box, then type in ncpa.cpl and press Enter), right-click on the Ethernet adapter in question and choose to disable it. This will just disable the Ethernet connection, not the actual (Ethernet adapter) device itself─that you can see in Device Manager.

If the wifi driver is unsigned, W11 may not accept it, and then the wifi hardware can become invisible.

I had this problem on one device, and I had to inject a signed driver into the driverstore (I used RAPR). Then when I booted, driver was accepted, and wifi appeared.

The tricky part is getting hold of latest signed drivers.

Thanks for your suggestions. Overnight I recalled I did a clean install recently while using ethernet connection. Maybe without an active WiFi the driver wasn't installed during the clean install. Using my wife's PC I researched and found the driver, installed it, rebooted and now have WiFi.