Prologue

I recently purchased a new laptop from HP for my latter half of my college career. I initially wanted to install linux on this machine so I booted gparted live on the laptop and removed every system partition I could find (yes I know this is bad for the ssd) because Windows 11 came preinstalled. I installed linux but quickly realized that I will be using this for school and will be using this laptop as my only access to a computer for an extended period of time. I needed to swap back to windows so I could use all of my very legally obtained software that I use daily. Anyways, I used gparted again to remove everything on the system and when I swapped back to Windows 10, I couldn't connect to the internet. Not only that, I couldn't even see the available networks. This is how I fixed it.

Solution

1. First, I went into the Device Manager and checked to see if my system recognized the hardware that I knew for a fact was there because during my time using linux, I was able to connect to the internet. I scrolled to Network adapters and saw a lot of different WAN miniports which I wasn't sure what they did. I continued scrolling to check the "Other Devices" tab and that's where I found the problem; Network Controller was listed and had a driver that was missing as in the image here.

2. Right click the Network Controller > Properties > Details and using the drop down menu labeled "Property" scroll to "Hardware ids"

3. Here, you can find the Vendor ID & Device ID (along with more but that doesn't matter now). Vendor id can be labeled as VEN or VID and device is labeled as DEV. I had four entries and they looked like this:

PCI\VEN_14C3&DEV_7961&SUBSYS_46821A3B&REV_00

PCI\VEN_14C3&DEV_7961&SUBSYS_46821A3B

PCI\VEN_14C3&DEV_7961&CC_028000

PCI\VEN_14C3&DEV_7961&CC_0280

4. I took the first one as it looked like it had the most information, the vendor ID was 14C3 and the device ID is 7961. Using a lookup tool called devicehunt.com I was able to find out that the vendor was MEDIATEK and I was looking for the MT7921 802.11ax PCI Express Wireless Network Adapter driver.

5. I simply copied "MT7921 802.11ax PCI Express Wireless Network Adapter" added the word "driver" to the end of a google search and found this Microsoft forums post. In this post, I found some solid potential solutions. First, someone named David M. found the link to the driver provided by HP here (download link) with the original source being here

6. There was one more that I found in a later comment which mentions it being a generic driver which made me more confident. I went with the 2nd option and it directed me to this link, I clicked the first result "MediaTek MT7921 Wi-Fi 6/6E Wireless LAN Drivers 3.4.2.1046" and I found a list of Hardware ids that were compatible. Using Ctrl + F I searched for "46821A3B" which is within the first Hardware id "PCI\VEN_14C3&DEV_7961&SUBSYS_46821A3B". I found that exact string in the list so I clicked download, transferred the file to the Laptop using a USB stick that I had lying around and voilà, I just had to follow the simple readme instructions under "InstallStep.txt" and it worked perfectly fine.

I also deleted the driver completely to see if the one from HP would work and it also worked perfectly fine.

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Now my laptop works like normal!