Windows 8 wireless menu

Let's see how. Classic Shell's Start Menu allows adding any shell folders as an expandable menu. If you are using Windows 7 style, press the Insert key on the keyboard while you are on the Customize Start Menu tab to add a new item. Pick Custom from the list and drag to reposition it wherever you want. That's it. Now you will get a nice cascading, flyout menu that shows your wireless networks.

You can right click on the connections inside the folder submenu to remove wireless profiles, rename a network, delete profiles or change their order. Winaero greatly relies on your support. You can help the site keep bringing you interesting and useful content and software by using these options:. If you like this article, please share it using the buttons below.

It won't take a lot from you, but it will help us grow. Thanks for your support! He started with Windows 95 and is good at software usability testing. He firmly believes that user experience is just as important as software code quality and architecture for software to be successful. View all posts by Gaurav Kale. The top left of the six icons associated with settings should allow you to see and select an available wireless network.

If you can see a Wi-Fi network right click the name and View Connection Properties rather than attempting to auto-connect via a left or double click. This will allow you to manually configure settings, including the security key, default channel, and auto-connection. Although I have not determined all the causes, once Windows 8 attempts to connect to a Wi-Fi network and fails to fully establish a connection, the Charms menu assumes that Wi-Fi has been disabled and you will be unable to see anything via the Charms menu.

Proceed to the next steps. Use services. Microsoft offers a step-by-step tutorial for troubleshooting — though you need a network connection to follow the tutorial Wired and wireless network problems.

They do mention the need to update drivers, a common and necessary solution with Windows 8. More on that later. At the prompt type netsh wlan show profile. This will let you know if you have a wireless adapter enabled and if it has attempted or succeeded in establishing a connection.

In the following screen shot, it is clear that the needed service is not running. In the following image, you can see the list of visible Wi-Fi profiles to which my system has connected. A very common symptom related to driver or configuration issues on Windows 8 is a Wi-Fi network that suggests a limited connection and reveals an APIPA Turn off at least temporarily any network monitoring application, firewall, NAP, etc.

At least during your diagnostics efforts. If the profile type cannot be established, security rules will block establishment from that moment forward. I wanted to bypass the Windows 8 start menu and charms bar in order to establish and validate a wireless connection.

Voila, connection to the WAP. But something was still wrong. The most common symptom associated with diabolical network connection failures is the inability to establish the profile category. Take a look at your adapter settings. To delete a stored wireless network profile , you should execute the following command:.

Replace the "Profile Name" part with the actual profile name from your PC. So, in my case, the commands could be as follows:. Mobile broadband networks are treated differently. If you manually connect to a mobile broadband network when there is a Wi-Fi network in range, the mobile broadband network is preferred just for that session. This is because mobile broadband networks typically are metered.

Also, you can prevent Windows from connecting automatically to any Wi-Fi network. Use the following netsh command:. Closing words For some reason, Microsoft made wireless connection management extremely hard for a novice user. The good old UI is gone forever, and everyone is forced to use the command line or some third-party apps. This is not convenient for most users.

If you want a graphical way to manage wireless networks which doesn't involve using netsh or command prompt, see this article. Winaero greatly relies on your support. You can help the site keep bringing you interesting and useful content and software by using these options:.

If you like this article, please share it using the buttons below. It won't take a lot from you, but it will help us grow. Thanks for your support! Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer from Russia who started Winaero back in On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software.