No internet connection after upgrading to Windows 10

I did not have any issues running preview version of Windows 10 but today I installed the regular version of lost my internet connection and have no idea what to do. I have been googling and looking for answers for the last hour and nothing seems to help.

Right click on the Start button and choose Device Manager, then check the Network adapters section to see if your particular networking device (wired or wireless) has been detected and the drivers are installed - if you don't see the hardware listed under that part of the device tree it could mean the final build of Windows 10 didn't or doesn't have the necessary drivers. Of course if that's the case you can't get online with that device either to get the latest drivers so you'll have to use another machine to acquire them.

I'm going on the assumption that's the case here, the drivers aren't being loaded because the device might have some issue and require manual install of the driver(s).

Yes I realize it probably worked previously with the preview build(s) but things are different now with the final one. I had one or two devices that worked fine in preview builds but didn't in the final release until I got online to get the latest drivers from Windows Update. It's somewhat ass-backwards but that's how it goes sometimes.

I have all the drivers installed and it says the ethernet is working fine but it just can't find the IP address when I try to troubleshoot the connection. I hope I worded that correctly to where you understand what I'm saying lol

A cheap web cam cost me my connection a few days ago. That was the only change I made and when I unplugged it my connection was fine again. Check to make sure everything has proper device drivers. If need be strip the machine right down to the bare minimum hardware wise see if you get it back and just add stuff until it either craps out again or installs proper drivers. Not going to say that's the problem but that's what happened to mine.

Every single thing in the device manager has a driver and is properly identified. Again though when I'm troubleshooting the internet connection it just says that it can't get an IP address.

That's what mine said as well. As soon as I removed that dumb webcam and rebooted it all worked again.

That happened to me and many other people when I went form 8.0>8.1. I used system restore to go back to a point before 8.1 was installed to fix it but I guess you can't do that.

Just for further clarification, misterbobby, when you say you installed "the regular version" of Windows 10, what exactly do you mean? Did you do an upgrade install (which is what's required to make Windows 10 legit) the first time, or are you saying you install the final build 10240 on top of the preview build, or something else? A clean install after wiping out the preview build, maybe?

For the record once again: you cannot clean install Windows 10 build 10240 and get it activated without having first done an upgrade installation on a legit activated installation of Windows 7, 8, or 8.1 - that's just the facts of life right now, and you can't upgrade it on top of any Insider preview build to get it activated either.

This could be where something is going wrong, depending on your situation.

It was the upgrade that I did.

And someone pointed me here https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/22283/Intel-Ethernet-Connections-CD to get the Ethernet drivers from there and it is working now. I guess whatever basic driver came on here after the upgrade was useless.

But did you do an upgrade on top of an Insider preview build or Windows 7/8/8.1, that's my question. If you upgraded on top of a preview build it should be unactivated and won't activate in the future.

Tiberian said:

But did you do an upgrade on top of an Insider preview build or Windows 7/8/8.1, that's my question. If you upgraded on top of a preview build it should be unactivated and won't activate in the future.

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Sorry if I was not clear. I did an upgrade from 8.1. I had been using the preview on a separate drive for a few weeks but had deleted that as of yesterday.

I dont see why they put a useless LAN driver on there but luckily we have another computer in the house or I would have been screwed on getting the real driver. And so glad I had not gotten rid of my cd burner as I had to go old school.

Gotcha, no worries. Now that you've done the upgrade install you can do a clean one from this point on and never have to put the Product Key in (you skip it during the clean install). And sometimes Microsoft chooses to withdraw a driver from a final distribution of an OS for whatever reasons; Intel could have asked them not to do include it because of some issue they detected, it could be any one of a dozen or more possibilities.

But you're up and functional now it seems. Just remember that if you do a clean install you may require that driver again so keep it around someplace.

Tiberian said:

Gotcha, no worries. Now that you've done the upgrade install you can do a clean one from this point on and never have to put the Product Key in (you skip it during the clean install). And sometimes Microsoft chooses to withdraw a driver from a final distribution of an OS for whatever reasons; Intel could have asked them not to do include it because of some issue they detected, it could be any one of a dozen or more possibilities.

But you're up and functional now it seems. Just remember that if you do a clean install you may require that driver again so keep it around someplace.

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So you dont need a product key when doing the clean install?

Correct. As long as you did a proper upgrade - that's the first step and must be done with Windows 10 because at this point Windows 10 is only available for activation as an upgrade - on top of a legit activated install of Windows 7, 8, or 8.1 what happens is a hardware hash aka fingerprint is generated which is stored on Microsoft's servers for future activation requests. Once that hash is stored on their end, you can then do a clean install of WIndows 10 on the same hardware anytime or as often as you like and when it comes to the point where it asks for the Product Key, you select "Skip" the first time and "Do this later" the second (because it asks for the key twice during installation).

When the clean installation is done, and you get online (in your case that might mean you have to install that driver again) it'll contact Microsoft, check the hardware hash and activate right then and there - you've already proven you're eligible for the free upgrade to Windows 10 with the upgrade installation, so there's no reason to not activate it once again.

Microsoft has basically removed the need to require people to keep Product Keys around by this method and I for one think it's an improvement - of course many can't stand it and hate it but whatever, that's their own little black hole to deal with.

So will it be hassle to do a "clean install" on nearly all new hardware? I might upgrade to Skylake in a few months and I dont want to be screwed as my original Windows 8.1 was the full version not OEM.

Are you connected to a router, hub or modem? Try power cycling them as it should flush DNS so you can acquire a new IP.

You can also try uninstalling the driver for your NIC, restarting windows and see if it will install a newer version.

ep0x73 said:

Are you connected to a router, hub or modem? Try power cycling them as it should flush DNS so you can acquire a new IP.

You can also try uninstalling the driver for your NIC, restarting windows and see if it will install a newer version.

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It was already fixed. See post # 9.

misterbobby said:

So will it be hassle to do a "clean install" on nearly all new hardware? I might upgrade to Skylake in a few months and I dont want to be screwed as my original Windows 8.1 was the full version not OEM.

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You make a phone call to Microsoft and tell them you had to replace your mobo because of some hardware problem - it's a little white lie basically that people have been using since XP was released, That's all it takes, a phone call, even Microsoft says as much in the Windows 10 FAQ (which I linked to in a previous post in another thread, I'm posting all over the place today). They help you by doing a new activation for the OS on the "new" hardware - you have a retail license so it can be transferred with the hardware when needed.

Tiberian said:

You make a phone call to Microsoft and tell them you had to replace your mobo because of some hardware problem - it's a little white lie basically that people have been using since XP was released, That's all it takes, a phone call, even Microsoft says as much in the Windows 10 FAQ (which I linked to in a previous post in another thread, I'm posting all over the place today). They help you by doing a new activation for the OS on the "new" hardware - you have a retail license so it can be transferred with the hardware when needed.

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Do I have to even lie though? Again the Win 8.1 I just upgraded from was full version not OEM. It seems like if you upgrade to 10 from full 8.1 that you still should have the benefits of that full version which means upgrading hardware anytime.

misterbobby said:

Do I have to even lie though? Again the Win 8.1 I just upgraded from was full version not OEM. It seems like if you upgrade to 10 from full 8.1 that you still should have the benefits of that full version which means upgrading hardware anytime.

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Call Microsoft and ask. For stuff they aren't explicitly clear enough about in the FAQ or elsewhere, that's always the suggestion: call them and ask. It can't hurt, although you may end up talking with someone speaking in a dialect you can't quite understand so you could be required to call back a few times to get someone you can actually communicate with.

Retail licenses are transferable so yes, technically you're not required to give up the little white lie so many others use, but you still have to call to get it done.