Did you power up your laptop only to be confronted by the yellow triangle of anguish over the WiFi icon of your Windows 10 PC? You are not alone.

As unofficial IT support to my friend and family network I’ve had four people in the last week suddenly report that their Windows 10 PC stopped connecting to the Internet. Other devices such as phones and tablets were logging on fine, but although the PCs would connect to the local WiFi network they could not access the Internet. A quick search online confirmed that others were experiencing this but with no formal solution – that’s too many to be a coincidence and might suggest a rogue Windows 10 update.

Here’s a quick and dirty way to get back online again.

1. Click Start and type RESTORE, and then select System Restore from the dialog that appears

2. Click Next and then click to highlight a date in the list of Restore Points

3. Click on Finish on the last screen and your system will reboot and restore, hopefully instantly reconnecting you to the joys of the Internet. This’ll take 10-20 minutes, depending on the speed of your computer.

This solution fixed all four PCs. You won’t lose any data, but if you’ve installed any applications since the restore point date you’ll need to reinstall them again. As always it is good practice to make a backup of your files before you proceed with something that (if it goes wrong) could brick your PC.

Of course, if this is down to a dodgy Windows update your computer might download the patch again and unceremoniously disconnect, but hopefully Microsoft will address the issue. If they don’t at least you know what to do to get up and running again…