Hi Todd, It would appear that the solution has turned out to be something far more prosaic...I had an external drive sitting on top of the XPS 8700 tower in the indentation that is supposed to be for charging accessories and a pen caddy temporarily sitting on the rear of the top (I'm rearranging the office to fit the new equipment!). I had opened the side to check that the wifi card was properly seated and there were no loose wires. Everything was fine, but I saw the two wires wrapping around the fan and disappearing up into the roof of the chassis. That stuck in my head and I started to wonder if they connected to a receiver for the wifi signal and if anything I had on top might have been interfering. So I took the drive and caddy off Friday night and the internet has been working fine ever since!  Someone on a Windows forum said the wires are the antenna, so it makes sense. I am letting it finish doing its Carbonite backups (first time on the new machine, so it is taking a while) and am leery of messing with anything. But when it's done, I will put each item back and see if it causes the same problem. I would be surprised if it were the drive in that the indentation is meant to hold stuff like iPhones and such (there is a recharging USB). There is a rectangle of smoother textured plastic near the back edge of the top, next to the service tag, that was where the caddy was sitting. So I wonder if that's not where the receiver would be? In any event, unless this was all a coincidence, it would seem to have been from something as stupid as having stuff on top of the box. I am going to leave the thread open until I can confirm by replacing the items. But for now, at least, it would seem to be working again!
I recently purchased an XPS 8700 (Windows 10). It recognized my wifi router immediately during set-up and was able to access the internet fine for about a week. In the last day or so, I noticed that it started having intermittent loss of connection. It was working this morning, but stopped and I have been unable to get it to work for the last hour or so. I rebooted both the router and the computer. I am typing this on a laptop which is able to access the wifi, so I know there is service and the router is working. Nothing was changed on the XPS 8700 (that I am aware of, assuming no background updates). The tower has sat on my desk and not been bumped or anything that might disconnect something internally. Yet it cannot find any wifi networks at all. When it was working, it saw my router as well as a couple others in the building. I also tried reloading the driver from the Dell website. I am also aware of the unsupported VPN software issue with Windows 10, but the command prompt fix doesn't work and, since the computer came with 10, as opposed to an upgrade, and it worked for a week, I don't think that's the problem. What I have is: Dell Wireless-N 1704 802.11bgn, 1x1, 2.4GHz + Bluetooth 4.0
Dell XPS 8700 Has Stopped Detecting Any Wi-Fi