Adding/Removing Wireless Profiles in Windows 8

I've had the wonderful opportunity to play with a Microsoft Surface. It's a pretty cool device. Usually, the first thing to do with any computing device is to connect it to my home wireless network. I'm no network administrator, but I've set up basic wireless security using WPA2 and MAC Address Filtering. I also refuse to broadcast the SSID.

Note: If you know a better way to do this, please let me know!

Adding a Wireless Profile

In Windows 8 (and 7), it is really easy to create a wireless profile. Just fire up desktop mode and swipe out the Charm menu (swipe in from the right of the desktop). Then, navigate to Settings -> Control Panel. From the Control Panel, click on Network and Internet. The rest is straightforward:

Removing a Wireless Profile

Let's say we wanted to remove or modify our newly created profile. In Windows 7, we simply follow these steps. Unfortunately, there is no way to manage wireless profiles from the Control Panel in Windows 8.

Forunately, the new wireless menu gives us options. We can right-click our SSID and click Forget this network:

Then, we could set it up all over again using the process above. The catch: this only works for networks we have already connected to.

Removing a Wireless Profile (Command Prompt)

Now, let's say we set up a faulty profile. Let's also assume we don't broadcast our SSID. Now, we can't connect to our network and it doesn't show up in the wireless menu!

Another option is to remove our wireless profile using netsh. This is a command line utility used for managing network configurations. All you do is open a Command Prompt and run the following:

netsh wlan show profile

Output:

Profiles on interface Wi-Fi:

Group policy profiles (read only)
---------------------------------
    <None>

User profiles
-------------
    All User Profile        : SSID1
    All User Profile        : SSID2
    All User Profile        : SSID3

And to delete the profile, just run:

netsh wlan delete profile SSID2

Output:

Profile "SSID2" is deleted from interface "Wi-Fi".

Voila! Now, you can recreate the broken profile following the same process above.