Question: My high-speed internet connection (DSL or wireless) recently stopped working. There used to be a thing called "Local Area Connection" in the Network Connections control panel, but now it doesn't seem to be in there. Could its absence be causing the problem? How do I get it to come back?

Answer: There will be no Local Area Connection icon when no network adapter is present or configured. So, something has happened to make your ethernet card stop working. To confirm this, go into Device Manager. To do this, right-click on "My Computer", and choose Properties. Click the Hardware tab and then the Device Manager button, or if there is no Hardware tab, just click the Device Manager tab. Look through the list and you'll have one or more items with yellow question marks or exclamation points next to them. These are the items not working. (If the network card does actually appear to be functioning, it's possible the Network Connections or Network Locations Awareness services have been stopped. See the comment from "poks" below this article.)

Any number of things could have gone wrong to cause your network card to stop functioning. Try restarting the computer and see if Windows automatically detects the card and gets it working again. If not, you'll probably want to pay a computer technician to look at the computer. However, if you feel confident enough with your computer, you can try uninstalling and re-installing the drivers for the card, doing a system restore back to when the internet was working, and other troubleshooting steps like that.