The other morning I woke up to see that our house wifi connection was down. No big deal, happens all the time. Restart the router, problem solved.
Nearly.
The connection came back up, every device in the house worked fine – phones, tablets, laptops, desktops. iOS, Windows, Android, OS X. Except my laptop, which runs Windows 8. It couldn’t even see the connection. Neighbours’ wifi – fine. My own wifi – vanished.
Not the end of the world – I re-enabled the wifi on the modem itself, bypassing the wifi router, and it worked fine, but that’s not ideal. For one thing, now there are two networks, so my computer can’t talk to anyone else’s. Secondly, the reason I disabled the modem’s wifi and replaced it with a dedicated router in the first is because it’s frankly crap. DNS lookups seemed to take an age, no matter what servers I used, so connecting to sites for the first time was painfully slow.
Troubleshooting was hard. Not being able to see a connection? Good luck Googling for that. Every site assumes you can’t connect, which isn’t the same thing at all. Eventually, in the depths of an obscure forum, in a throwaway suggestion, I found my solution:
Windows 8 Hates Channel 6
Changed the channel to 8, restarted the router, suddenly everything’s rainbows and unicorns.
[Icon from: dAKirby309 via IconFinder]