One day, the wi-fi in my dad’s Lenovo T14 ThinkPad suddenly disappeared. For some unknown reason, the laptop suddenly assumed it was a desktop PC; Bluetooth and many other features vanished as well.
At first we assumed the ThinkPad needed no more than a restart or a software update, but that was not the case. My dad tried to debug things, but was ultimately unsuccessful (and did not have that much time to spare). As a makeshift fix, he connected an ethernet cable to the machine and left it at that.
Last Tuesday, I decided to jump in and take a look. First, I called up Lenovo tech support. Within minutes, I was placed on a call with a man with a Southern drawl. To my horror, I learned that the ThinkPad’s 1-year warranty had expired on the 13th of March; as was the case, the Kang family was not eligible for support.
The tech support guy strongly recommended going to one of their authorized hardware repair centers, but was nice enough to talk things through a bit before hanging up. From our conversation, I got the gist that it was the MediaTek MT7921 wi-fi card at fault.
Googling around with the MT7921 name gave me many more answers.
I eventually found a solution: holding down the power button for 60s to trigger a reset. (The other fix I tried was uninstalling and re-installing the drivers for the MT7921 manually.) Success!
