Windows 8: Cleaning up WIFI Profiles and VPN Networks

The other day on my Windows 8 laptop, I noticed a few dozen WIFI connections for places I was unlikely to ever visit again (hotel WIFI connections from business trips and vacations). You would think in 2014 that these would be easy to delete via an administrative GUI.

To delete your superfluous WIFI connections

1) Open a command prompt (CMD from from the Windows 8 main screen)

2) Run the command "netsh wlan show profiles" in the console window:

The output generated by "netsh wlan show profiles" will appear as follows:

Profiles on interface Wi-Fi:

Group policy profiles (read only)

---------------------------------

    <None>

User profiles

-------------

    All User Profile     : San.Diego.Airport.Free.WIFI

    All User Profile     : BW Rockland

    All User Profile     : Travelodge5

    All User Profile     : Holiday Inn On-WiFi 13

    All User Profile     : HolidayInn-1

    All User Profile     : Holiday Inn On-WiFi 10

    All User Profile     : Holiday Inn On-WiFi 14

    All User Profile     : BWLakeLucilleInn

3) Delete each unwanted profile using: netsh wlan delete profile name="ProfileName"

To delete the Wasilla, Alaska, Best Western's WIFI profile the command to execute is:

netsh wlan delete profile name="ProfileName"

Microsoft has a great overview of the netsh command at "Manage wireless network profiles".