Super frustrated with Windows 10 - Home Networking!!

Hmm, was SNMP Simple Network Management also on? Also I should have said that you need to shutdown the laptop and then start it up again (cold start). If you have not done a cold start yet do that first and have a look again. If still no love enable SNMP and cold start again.

I had the same issue as you and found that on all but one of my machines both services needed to be enabled for things to start working. One of my machines however was and is happy with just the SMB1.0/CIFS file sharing support enabled. Can't explain the why to that but it works and that's good enough for me.

Another thing that might make a difference in my setup is that my router serves as the Master Browser and is the only Master Browser in the network. At one point I like you had multiple Master Browsers. A shutdown of all networked computers and the router then startup the router first followed by the attached computers solved that issue for me and it has not returned since even though I have had to reboot the router a number of times since.

musiclover7 said:

That doesn't explain why I can access just fine from one computer on the wired network, but not from another on wireless. C is not shared, but the rest of my drives are, and that is the way I want them. I'd rather not take the time to share every folder after root if I don't have to, and given that it works fine on wired, just not from wireless...?

I can also access these shares fine from my Android phones, using the email address user account. Very strange.

Hi there

Android is essentially LINUX which has had decent networking from the outset and accesses Windows via the SAMBA protocol which works straight out of the box in 999.999% out of 1000% cases.

I agree with you that I've always had random issues with Windows networking -- sometimes ONE seemingly identical computer just won't connect while all the other ones do !!!

I don't though think it's a good idea to share a '$' prefixed drive -- create a "standard" share.

Other than that I think it's just a question of trial and error -- various things work sometimes and then they suddenly stop !!!
The only problem with Linux / Android is if using Wifi -- but these days Linux kernels have most of the common wifi drivers built into the kernel so you probably won't encounter problems there.

Another idea while testing is to turn firewalls off -- although why one computer works and another doesn't --- the Wonder of Windows !!!!!!.

Good luck with it though.

Cheers
jimbo

That was my sense. Chalk it up to Windows networking, which is sometimes just flaky. It just felt very familiar to the experience I had at my friends clinic a few months ago where everything worked fine when wired on the network, but not when wireless. There were 2 Mac laptops that were just fine in that mix, but the windows devices were equally flaky when trying to access each other over wireless. This situation at my house felt like that, accept here, I can't even get my kids laptop to detect the other machines when I browse to network in file explorer. The only way I can get to a login prompt, is to punch in the address manually. Just infuriating.

Have you tried using the built-in Homegroup network setup?

I haven't. I've had bad experiences with homegroup too, usually when the main pc fails in the home group, or you need to leave for whatever reason, etc.. that is probably worth a shot though.

In Network and Sharing Center on this laptop does your active network show as a Private network or Public Network? It needs to be Private for you to view and access LAN shares.

Active network is private.