Wifi error with driver

[Chintan Gohel]

I recently got a surface 3 in a lumia conversations competition. It was sent, I paid the required taxes to the Kenyan government and I've been using it for over 3 months now

The problem I've been running into of late is that the wifi option keeps disappearing from action center and settings. I can go to device manager and I find that the wifi driver has an issue. It shows the triangle with the exclamation mark. I disable the driver and enable it, restart the surface and wifi starts working again

The problem is I have to do this frequently especially after waking the device from sleep or hibernate. An added problem is wifi keeps dropping and I have to manually connect the wifi

What are the solutions to these problems? I'm hoping it's software related and not hardware

Any help would be appreciated, thank you

 

[Chintan Gohel]

More info: surface 3, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD
I've updated everything. Even the firmware update that came out has been installed
I'm in Kenya so no possibility of service here.

 

[Chintan Gohel]

Anyone? It's happening more frequently now

 

[eagle63]

For about the first week I owned my Surface 3, it was failing to reconnect to WiFi whenever resuming from hibernate mode. However, it's been fine ever since - including with the January 2016 firmware update. (and I have no idea why it suddenly started working again) Sorry, not sure what it could be in your case.

Is this happening on all wifi networks? Or just yours? (you're not "hiding" the SSID are you?)

 

[Telstar1948]

You might try uninstalling the WiFi driver and rebooting. It will reinstall automatically. That may give you a better result that just disabling it and enabling it. There have been some reporting a seeming conflict while BT items are operational. Both BT & WiFi are supposedly on the same chip so some have found that BT will sometimes cause WiFi to drop. I don't know how true this is, but you may want to turn off BT and see how your S3 does that way. Ultimately, you may have to do a clean install of Windows 10 if nothing else works.

I've noticed no issues with my S3 with the WiFi driver. Some have had issues, but many have not.

 

[Chintan Gohel]

You might try uninstalling the WiFi driver and rebooting. It will reinstall automatically. That may give you a better result that just disabling it and enabling it. There have been some reporting a seeming conflict while BT items are operational. Both BT & WiFi are supposedly on the same chip so some have found that BT will sometimes cause WiFi to drop. I don't know how true this is, but you may want to turn off BT and see how your S3 does that way. Ultimately, you may have to do a clean install of Windows 10 if nothing else works.

I've noticed no issues with my S3 with the WiFi driver. Some have had issues, but many have not.

I'll try the uninstalling part, thank you. Bluetooth is never on as I don't use it

 

[Chintan Gohel]

You might try uninstalling the WiFi driver and rebooting. It will reinstall automatically. That may give you a better result that just disabling it and enabling it. There have been some reporting a seeming conflict while BT items are operational. Both BT & WiFi are supposedly on the same chip so some have found that BT will sometimes cause WiFi to drop. I don't know how true this is, but you may want to turn off BT and see how your S3 does that way. Ultimately, you may have to do a clean install of Windows 10 if nothing else works.

I've noticed no issues with my S3 with the WiFi driver. Some have had issues, but many have not.

Did the reinstall but no luck

This is the error when I check the driver details when it stops working:

Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware because a previous instance of the device driver is still in memory. (Code 38)

The driver could not be loaded because a previous version of the driver is still in memory.

So, how do I find the old driver and remove it?

 

[Bo]

you'll have to look in device manager, select the component and remove the driver then reboot. one suggestion I have that seems to work for my other windows devices is to just use a USB WiFi adapter. you can use that all the time or just when you have the issue of WiFi dropping out. you can then reboot whenever you want instead of needing to reboot to continue working.

 

[GizmoEV]

I had similar issues along with some other issues. I finally just did a compete refresh. On setup I turned off automatic updating. I then did a check for updates and installed only the firmware update. After that was done I then I did a full update. My Surface 3 has run much better today. It even seems to have better battery life.

 

[Chintan Gohel]

you'll have to look in device manager, select the component and remove the driver then reboot. one suggestion I have that seems to work for my other windows devices is to just use a USB WiFi adapter. you can use that all the time or just when you have the issue of WiFi dropping out. you can then reboot whenever you want instead of needing to reboot to continue working.

I did what you said about removing the drivers and then rebooting, that didn't work as a permanent solution
Thank you nevertheless

 

[Chintan Gohel]

I had similar issues along with some other issues. I finally just did a compete refresh. On setup I turned off automatic updating. I then did a check for updates and installed only the firmware update. After that was done I then I did a full update. My Surface 3 has run much better today. It even seems to have better battery life.

I'll try that when I get wifi again and I have a working external hard drive to store my stuff

 

[FAHMI BASSEM]

I had similar issues along with some other issues. I finally just did a compete refresh. On setup I turned off automatic updating. I then did a check for updates and installed only the firmware update. After that was done I then I did a full update. My Surface 3 has run much better today. It even seems to have better battery life.

I started getting the same mentioned WiFi issue after a clean install of Windows 10, I used the official general ISO and not the one built for my device, I think this caused the issues BUT I installed the full drivers package from Surface site, installed it but still no luck