Can't See Other PC's On Home Network

Welcome to my personal nightware: Win10 networking.

As of today, neither of my Win10 laptops can see each other, yet again. This was totally resolved last weekend, resulting in my post above, being happy that all is sorted out once I restarted my router and modem. A perfect fix.

It's not.

So when neither machine could find each other today, I restarted the router and modem. It didn't fix anything. But when trying to access both machines using their IP's, I can't get to the other laptops shared "C" drives, but I can get to their "Users" folders. So I guess that this means that I now, again, have a connection between these laptops. In fact, in File Explorer, I can now "see" the other computer by their IP address, not their computer names.

What's actually going on here? How can I get back to seeing each laptop, by name, with access to their fully shared "C" drives?

Thanks folks!
-bjk

You're nightmare is shared by many. My very first visit to this forum was to seek help with the same problem.

Windows networks with only two or three machines that are switched on and off regularly are prone to discovery problems. As long as you can access network shares using ip addresses, you're LAN remains useful. Some just put a shortcut to the ip address on the desktop and get on with life. Not being able to "see" the other machine is annoying but not harmful.

I no longer have any discovery problems and I attribute that having one computer that runs 24/7. In my case, I have machines on the LAN that require SMBv1 and the always-on machine acts as a permanent master browser.

JackHughs

I would go back and check that the scheduled task solution I gave you earlier is actually running.

Jack - thanks for your insights. I can def move on, but I'd like to be able to access the "C"drives that are shared. Thankfully, I can share our printer across the network when I access both machines with their IP addresses.

OldNavyGuy- I need to implement that batch job again. Tomorrow! I'll report back.

- - - Updated - - -

Well, here's my status of of "today". Apparently, in the Win10 networking world, "today" needs to be stated up front b/c things may change tomorrow.

I started up both laptops today and they found each other perfectly. How great it that?

But still, while I can share a printer connected to one laptop (a really needed thing) and I can access the "User" folder on each other laptop, I still could not access the shared "C" drive on each laptop over the network.

I found this site, which offered some insights on Step 3 "Check Your PC's Credentials", and setting the proper credentials on both machines was the fix. Now, I can access the shared "C" drives fully on both machines.

The thing that does make 100% sense for me was, before this fix, Win10 just told me that I have no access to the shared C drives on the other laptop over the network, without just asking me for credentials. It's done this properly in the past. It used to say "You can't access this without a user name and password", or something like that, and I'd provide those credentials and all was OK. Now, it just says "No dice buddy - out of luck". Once I set the credentials on both laptops, they now happily access each other's C drives.

As I've posted a few times in this thread over time, all is well now.
I need this to last for a while!!

Thanks again for all the help.
-bjk

When you can't see your computers that's when you should run lanscan on one of them and see if/who is the master browser. You can do it the hard way and open a command prompt and use

nbtstat -a ComputerName

for each computer and device and see if one returns something like this:

This is my NAS device


If no MSBROWSE indication is listed there for any of them then the election hasn't been held or is being held. As I recall it can take 15-20 minutes for them to make the determination as to who is the master browser. I'm no networking expert by a long shot but I really think that's all that's going on.

You could try leaving one of them on 24/7 for a few days and see if the problem is gone.

HERE is Scottie's Tech web page with some very good info about networks and Windowz

Excellent.
Need to look into this further.
Thanks!!
-bjk