Windows 8.1: WiFi dropping and/or "Limited"

You have knowledge that you have mugged up bro, sorry to say that. I have tried what you said, and I am a Computer Science graduate myself, you think I haven't tried everything under the Sun to make this work? :)

Also, let me tell you something, Connectify is FREE. Unlike Microsoft products. Its not a hack, go to their website and check what it is. It is a software that enables your computer to connect to several devices at the same time, a function missing from Windows.

I think you didn't do your bit of reading!

You are no Microsoft Support Engineer is correct. Are you trying to sell some useless software that will hog network resources for no reason? Windows does not turn off the network adapter due to lack of network activity. That would be ridiculous and a waste of event monitoring. It is the driver that is not representing the sleep state correctly which makes it impossible for windows to broadcast a wake up event since there is no reason for it to. The setting was added a while ago to disable the ability for a driver to handle the sleep or a network adapter because Microsoft new that 3rd party drivers were not handling the feature correctly and it would interfere with the usability of the PC. Refer to this article to understand what is happening. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2740020/en-us and note the section that reads:

"The Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power setting controls how the network card is handled when the computer enters sleep and can be used if a driver misrepresents how it handles sleep states.Windows never turns off the network card due to inactivity."

I would suggest that no one use this kind of hacky workaround to fix a network issue and would advice everyone to open a new thread since limited connections and no internet access could be from any number of things and that is not the actual error those to connection status are only an alert saying there is something not right.

Please post to your own thread for more accurate and safer help with networking issues

Good Luck

I am no stupid Microsoft support engineer but i will give you a crazy idea, and I am sure this will be helpful to a **** lot of people on the internet. I had read about it somewhere that this happens because 8.1 is just too intelligent. It shuts off the net when there are no background processes using the net, so that means if you are on FB and you are on one page for too long and there are no chat messages coming in, it will shut it off. Well, to keep your net pre-occupied, you need a software which utilizes the net all the time. For me, that software is "Connectify." This is all that you need to do: 1. Download and install Connectify, preferably the Pro version and I don't need to tell you where you will get that from for free ;) 2. Run Connectify 3. Start the Hotspot 4. The problem might persist if you put your computer to sleep and come back again, but it won't otherwise Let me know if this works for now. I will keep you guys posted about the real update to the problem, but this should work for now. Thanks.

Which is good, but sadly results in a blue screen after returning from hibernate on the Surface Pro 3. Microsoft still need to fix it.

Even without the catastrophic blue screen, turning off the power saving like this will impact the laptop power usage quite a bit so it is not ideal at all.

Considering it is now August 2014, and I am seeing this on a Flagship MS product (the Surface Pro 3), I think there is a bug MS need to address.

This happens with ALL wifi routers.

My best guess here is a race condition when coming out of standby. What it looks like to me is that the logical connection is started, before the hardware for the wifi is properly back from the low power/hibernate state. The fix may be either to have the hardware flag that it is ready, and windows wifi handling to detect this properly, or as a slightly rubbish fall back, make windows wait a second or so before trying to reconnect it. 

Either way - short term - I have had to disconnect, and reconnect every time I come out of standby. This is regardless of wifi at my home, my office, a hotel or cafe. 

I did try to disable the low power, but annoyingly on this device that lead to a blue screen of death (which while significantly better in windows 8.1 with more diagnostic abilities, is still pretty unpleasant).

Come on MS - pull a finger out, this should be a critical fix to 8.1. Seeing it on a flagship OS on an MS branded device is plain embarrassing. It is one of my few annoyances with this otherwise splendid tablet.