WiFi is not a new term for us. We all use WiFi networks around us to connect our system to access the Internet. Most of the devices having WiFi support also have the ‘connect automatically’ facility, so that if you came in the range of a previously used WiFi network, at second instance, you get connected automatically. A time may come when you may find that there are just too many WiFi network profiles present on your Windows computer, many of which you may not need now.
While there are four ways to delete WiFi Network Profile, in this post, we will see how to manually delete WiFi Network Profiles using CMD command and Registry in Windows 11/10.
Basically, Windows doesn’t provide you the native options to delete a WiFi network from the profiles list. In Windows 11/10/8.1, you have the option to Forget Network. However, forgetting the network does not completely remove the entries of the network profile. If you connect using this network in the future, you might face trouble while connecting. In such a case, you may need to erase the unusable WiFi networks manually following this way:
Delete WiFi Network Profiles using Registry
1. Open administrative Command Prompt and run following command to get a list of all the wireless networks to which your system has made the connection:
netsh wlan show profiles
2. Refer to the above-shown image, suppose we want to delete the wireless network profile dlink 15. So we run this command to erase it:
netsh wlan delete profile name="dlink 15"
Here you can replace the dlink 15 network with the WiFi network profile name you wish to delete on your system, Windows will notify you when it is done. You can re-run the command mentioned in step 1 to assure that the network profile has been removed. However, still, there is no complete removal of the network, so go to the next step.
3. Moving on, press Windows Key + R combination, type put Regedt32.exe in Run dialog box and hit Enter to open the Registry Editor.
4. Navigate here:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\NetworkList\Profiles
5. In the left pane of this location, under the Profiles key, you’ll see long name subkeys. For each network, either it is WiFi or Ethernet type, there is a unique key.
You have to highlight each key in the left pane and in the right pane, check the ProfileName string’s Value data; like we have found the entry for dlink 15 which we deleted in step 2. Once you find the correct subkey for deleted network profile, right-click on it and select Delete.
Thus your selected network profile gets removed completely.
Related read: How to Forget Wireless Network Profiles in Windows
