This is a bit of a sad tale.

I came to my laptop this morning and it said that I had no network connectivity.

I did an ipconfig and saw that I had no ipaddress.

I did an ipconfig /renew and I got an error saying "no adapter is in a suitable state" (I'm sure you've seen this one in your time).

I went to disable the adapter and re-enable it as that usually fixes things. I got a message saying that the adapter couldn't be disabled at the moment.

I did a restart.

The machine got to the screen that says "Shutting down..." and stuck there for a full 5 minutes. I'd got very bored by that time so I held down the power button to kill the thing.

After a reboot it's all fine but that catalogue of problems shouldn't really occur - perhaps the network driver went horribly wrong overnight and nothing could be done to get it to come back to life but it'd be nice if it surfaced itself in a more user-friendly way.