Sometimes when you create an ad-hoc WiFi network (WiFi hotspot) on your smartphone in order to share the mobile data with other devices around you, the WiFi network is not visible to some of the devices. It is a strange situation when some devices can see and connect to your WiFi network, but others cannot even see the network.
If you click on the WiFi icon in the notification area icon, it will show a list of all the available WiFi networks in your vicinity. But the network that you want to connect to is not even visible in this list. You can try enabling and disabling the WiFi on your computer but the problem stays the same.
The problem is because of some hardware settings in the WiFi 802.11n adapter attached in your Windows PC. By chancing these settings, we can make it work with all the WiFi networks. Here is how:
- Press Win+R, type devmgmt.msc in the Run dialog and press Enter. This will open the Device Manager window on your PC.
- In the device manager, find your WiFI adapter from under the Network adapters category.
- Right-click on the WiFi network adapter and choose Properties from the right-click menu.
- In the WiFi adapter properties, switch to the Advanced tab.
- Select the Country Region property and then choose #5 because it covers all the channels used (1 to 14).
- Click on the OK button to save the settings.
Now you can try clicking on the WiFi icon in the system tray of the Windows desktop, you will be able to find all the available WiFi networks in your surroundings. If setting the country region to #5 does not work, then you might be using the WiFi network at 5GHz as opposed to 2.4 GHz. In that case, you have to first find the channel used by the WiFi network using WiFiInfoview and then using a country region supporting that channel.