Question Network Shares issue on Windows 10/Windows 11 ?

[paul89895]

I have a home network consisting of the following:

1. Windows 10 PC on a wired connection to my ISP router (Actiontec T3200M).
2. Windows 10 laptop on wifi on the Actiontec.
3. New Windows 11 PC currently running on wifi.
4 Amazon Firestick (runs Android) running on wifi.
5 Various tablets and phones, all Android and running on wifi.

PC #1 is my main PC and is the main media server for my home network. I have set up numerous shared folders requiring no passwords for Everyone on my network. We can see all of these shares from every Android system on my network, in particular from the Amazon Firestick. But I can also see all of these shares from all of our tablets and phones.

However, I have a devil of a job trying to see these shares from my other Windows PCs (nos 2 and 3). This should be easy since this is simple Windows networking (that's what all the books and everything else says). I have tried all the items mentioned in instructions for setting up Windows networking - same workgroup, network discovery on etc.

And sometimes I have even managed to get the thing to work i.e. I have been able to see the #1 PC shares from the other Windows PCs. In fact this was working OK until I had to restart the #1 PC. Then the other PCs could no longer see the shares, but all of the Android devices could see them.

Currently the situation seems to change regularly without me doing anything (at least nothing that I am aware of. For instance earlier on the new PC Windows Explorer showed the #1 PC in the network section, but when I double click it it says it cannot find it. The windows Network Troubleshooter is useless - when you run it it says that I should contact my network administrator (which is me) and gives me no useful information to work with. And when I run Windows Explorer now on the new PC nothing shows up under Network.

If anyone can help me resolve this issue I would be eternally grateful. I'm 77, a retired network support supervisor, and would like to solve this one in my lifetime.

 

[lantis3]

Shutdown everything, then restart one by one. Start with router.

How do you copy and paste these boxes from Windows - I tried Windows Snip but it does not work.

Win10/11 are different. Both will copy to clipboard. Win11 will snapshot automatically to \pictures\snapshots, win10 will not, you have to open paint and paste the clipboard into it.

 

[paul89895]

I now have a new issue with the shares of video files on my PAUL-PC Windows 10 PC. After trying a number of things suggested here in this discussion the Windows 10 shares still show up on my FireTV (good) but now when I play them, using everything the same on the Firestick. the videos play for a variety of different times and then quit. The times could be 3, 5, 10, 25 or even as much as 45 minutes I then have to restart the video. This has also happened when playing a shared video on my Windows 10 laptop (i.e. it is not a Firestick issue).

The only change I made to the PAUL-PC that I am aware of, was to set smb 1 which I have now turned off but it still halts at varying times, this time about 25 minutes.

I have tried looking t at the event viewer on my PC for the approximate time this happens but I cannot find anything specific - any thoughts on what I might look for? Also this happened with shares on 2 different hard drives and in 2 different formats - avi and mp4

 

[lantis3]

Disable ethernet and wifi adapters power saving

 

[paul89895]

Did not seem to make any difference