Starting Windows 8 WLAN AutoConfig Service

Starting Windows 8 WLAN AutoConfig service is very similar to how you did it in Windows 7. This is built-in wireless utility in Windows 8 that allows you to connect your wireless adapter to wireless network without additional 3rd party wireless utility. This is always my prefer way to manage my wireless adapter, because it’s easy to use and I don’t have to spend additional time to install and learn 3rd party wireless utility.

Let’s explore together in order to start this WLAN Autoconfig service here:

1) First, click Desktop tile on Start screen in order to go to Windows desktop environment that you are familiar with.

2) Once you have gone into that typical Desktop environment, move your finger or cursor to the upper or lower right in order to open the Charms bar, after that click on Settings charm. Too bad the typical Start button is no longer there.

3) Continue to click Control Panel in Settings charm.

4) Control Panel window will appear, after that go ahead to click System and Security.

5) System and Security window will appear, continue to click on Administrative Tools.

6) Scroll down and look for Services, after that click on it.

7) Once you have gone into Services window, scroll down and look for WLAN AutoConfig. Once you have identified it, you can find out its status and also startup type. Double click on it in order to open the properties of this service, so that you can further manipulate the service settings.

8) WLAN Autoconfig Properties will appear, click on the dropdown arrow and change it to Automatic if the startup type is not set to automatic. You can also click Start to start the service if it’s not started. Click Apply and OK at last.

Note: If you don’t enable this feature, the Windows OS will not detect any wireless network and you need to use other wireless utility to do it.

Note: If somehow the WLAN AutoConfig service cannot be started, try the following methods to resolve it:

Go ahead to update the wireless adapter driver to latest version and see if it helps. Usually you will be able to locate and download the latest driver software from the wireless adapter vendor website. If you are not sure how to update the wireless adapter driver, check out this network adapter driver article to get more help.

If still you face the problem after performing the wireless adapter driver update successfully, check out this article to get more ideas to resolve this problem.