New
#1
Annoying Strange Network Issue
I'm hoping one of you experts will be able to help me. I've got Win764 on 3 computers (one Pro and 2 Home Premium) and Win732 on a laptop. I use a 3rd party Firewall called Vipre Premium (does antivirus also) and have found that the Homegroup has never worked well for me, plus my laptop could never join my homegroup... So I have disabled the homegroup on all computers and assigned individual static IPs for all and created a workgroup that all belong to. I have also setup shared folders and hard drives for them to access. Now for the weird part. When I had the homegroup installed and running when the computers were actually able to see each other (it would be hit or miss and some would lose the ability to see the one or more of the other computers) I could access the shared folders and hard drives. Now, after disabling the homegroup most of the computers can no longer access the shared root hard drive. It can access any shared folders but not the hard drive. For example, I have a hard drive that I named "Backups" but despite having it shared with "Everyone" and having full read/write access I will get an error saying unable to access it and to check my shared settings... Some of the computers actually can still access one of the shared Hard drives in addition to the folders and one computer seems to be able to access hard drives on all computers except the laptop. It's very frustrating and nothing I've tried fixes it. I didn't have this issue with using the homegroup but had the issue of disappearing computers (though I have a program that synchronizes data/folders and it would still work just fine when Explorer couldn't see/access them...). I've checked settings so many times and am stumped why this is. I have also turned off passwords for them and have tried shutting off the firewall to see if that's the issue and it's not. Any ideas what's going on or how to fix it? Thanks for any help you can provide!