≡ Menu

Enable Wireless connection in Windows Server 2012

In this post, I will show you how to enable Wireless connection in laptop after installing Windows Server 2012.

After a failure attempt to install Vmware server on my laptop, I decided to switch to Hyper-V as my hypervisor to host VMs. I downloaded VHD file of Windows sever 2012 and booted my laptop from that(I will cover this boot from VHD in a upcoming posts) downloaded VHD. Everything was fine, except my server OS is not coming into network. The wireless connection was not working and in disabled state like shown in below picture.

Since Network connection is very much required for my lab setup, I decided to explore it more. One option is, I can use a Wired connection to get internet and network but that will defeat the purpose of laptop. So I checked why wireless connection is not working. While exploring the features list via “Add roles and features wizard” in server manager I stumbled on the feature called “Wireless LAN service”. I quickly enabled the feature using the below powershell commands.

Import-Module ServerManager            
Add-WindowsFeature -Name Wireless-Networking

and the output is something like below and I restarted my laptop to finish the installation.

After rebooting the laptop I verified the status of my wireless connection again, and to disappoint me, it is in the same disabled state. Then after some googling, I went into device manager on my windows server 2012, and tried upgrading the wireless card drivers and it worked like a champ.

Now I have wireless enabled and working on my laptop with Windows server 2012 OS.

Hope this helps and happy learning.

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • Bill Hathaway March 7, 2018, 7:01 am

    You fixed it for me. I had the same issue. Was disappointed after doing the power shell but as you described a reload of the driver brought it on-line. Thank you