My brother reported a problem yesterday with his laptop and asked me to take a look. The laptop is a Lenovo YOGA 710-14ISK. His initial report was that he did a windows update on Saturday (18 April) and he could no longer connect to the internet. At the time he was running Windows 10 Home (x64) Version 1903 (build 18362.657). KB4532693, Update for Windows 10 (KB4532693) and KB4552152, Security Update for Windows 10 (KB4552152) were recently installed. The symptoms were that the network icon on the task bar would show WiFi as off. It would give an option to turn Wifi on "Manually" "In 1 hour" etc. Selecting manually did not turn on WiFi. He asked me to do a fresh install of windows 10 for him.
I built a Windows 10 install disk off my laptop which is running Windows 10 Home (x64) Version 1909 - note the version difference. On initial install, a roadcom driver from 2/10/2020 - Version 7.77.113.0 is automatically loaded. Unfortunately I do not know what was running previously. The hardware ID of the device is listed as VEN_14E4&DEV_43A3. The hardware ID is where I got the Broadcom 4350 info from. The laptop is now running Windows 10 Home (x64) Version 1909 build 18363.778. I was able to install updates KB4549951 and KB4537572.
Right now, in order to get the WiFi to connect, I boot up windows, login, open the Network & Internet setting, and click on Change Adapter settings. The Broadcom device is labeled "Wi-Fi 2" and is listed as enabled. At this point, I disable the device and re-enable it. I can then connect to WiFi. I have checked the power settings for the device and set it to not allow the computer to turn off. My brother reports that he did not have to restart the device previously (and I don't think he would know how to anyway).
Part 1 - Is there a work around for needing to restart the network adapter after bootup?
I got to this point only after determining one of the updates was completely breaking the network adapter. Updating windows with the April Cumulative update - KB4550945 doesn't allow the network adapter to start at all. The device name has changed from Broadcom 802.11ac Network Adapter to Broadcom 802.11N Network Adapter. I believe ac and N are really the same thing but I find it interesting that the name has changed. The driver is now a March 2012 driver. I tried manually downloading the driver and installing it via the update driver from the device manager but the 2012 driver is still being used. Right now I've delayed Windows updates for the maximum amount of time.
Part 2 - Is there a work around for the Broadcom drivers in this Windows update?