I have an application that directly controls the windows wifi interface card using the Native Wifi API ( -us/library/ms706556%28VS.85%29.aspx ). Please take as a given for this question that I need to directly control the wifi adapter using this documented api and can't just leave it up to OS and user.
The Windows 7 virtual adapter is supposed to be included with any approved Windows 7 wifi drivers. The drivers that out there now seem to be pretty buggy, and I've found that unless I manually disable the virtual wifi adapter the real adapter will not reliably connect to a wireless access point when commanded by the WLAN api.
Microsoft Virtual Wifi Miniport Adapter Driver Windows 7.epub
In the control panel > Network and Internet there's an option that says: "add a wireless device". I used that to detect the microsoft virtual wifi miniport adapter, cause after I installed Windows 7 it didn't appear in the network adapters but it was there and enabled, but not started.To disable it from a command prompt run as administrator you could try:netsh wlan set hostednetwork mode=disallow(or disallowed, I haven't tried). See -us/library/dd815243%28VS.85%29.aspx
Do you use Microsoft virtual WiFi miniport adapter on your computer? What can you do if the adapter runs into error code 31? In this post, MiniTool will give the answers for you and provide a step-by-step guide to fix error code 31.
Microsoft virtual WiFi miniport adapter is a virtual device that is used to virtualize your network adapter. This feature has been developed since Windows 7 and it can be employed on any laptops and mobile devices with WiFi cards.
This tool will start detecting potential problems related to your hardware and devices. If any problems are detected, just follow the onscreen instruction to fix them. After that, the Microsoft virtual WiFi miniport adapter error code 31 should be resolved.
If your Windows cannot load the drivers required by Microsoft virtual WiFi miniport adapter, perhaps the drivers are outdated. In this case, you just need to update the related drivers. To update device drivers in Windows 10, you can refer to this post.
The Microsoft virtual WiFi miniport adapter has been around since Windows 7 and features on laptops and mobile devices with WiFi cards. It is a virtual adapter that allows Windows to split a network in two, either to act as a wireless bridge or WiFi hotspot. These are useful if you need to extend a wireless connection or provide WiFi for other devices but does come with a performance overhead.
For example, if you connect your laptop to your only Ethernet port, you can make your laptop a wireless hotspot for other devices to connect to in order to gain internet access. As a network card can only connect to a single network at a time, Microsoft introduced the Microsoft virtual WiFi miniport adapter to overcome that limitation.
Leaving Microsoft virtual WiFi miniport adapter enabled can slow down your primary wireless connection. It likely comes with a small performance and battery overhead too but these will likely be very small.
Unless you use your computer as a WiFi hotspot or as a bridge for other devices, you do not need the Microsoft virtual WiFi miniport adapter. It is a great idea by Microsoft but is only useful in certain situations. As there is a network overhead involved with having the adapter running, you may receive a marginal network performance gain from disabling it. 2ff7e9595c
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