Win 7 Create a Homegroup greyed out. Win 7 Professional

[foxint]

Hi Guys

Spent all yesterday and this morning.... I have 5 computers and they are all on HOMEGROUP. So I would rather like to retain Homegroup. I have tried the
MS Fix-it
renaming the group
Deleting the workgroup
Setting up from scratch
yes read all the post that mean zero
My last attempt before I throw the towel in an get a mac....

Can anyone PLEASE HELP

 

[ish4d0w]

Hi


Plan A:
Try turning off your firewall if you have one (other than the windows firewall)
Try recreating the group: disconnect from the homegroup on all computers and create it on the computer that's problematic. Then have all other computers join it.

But I suppose you might have done that. If it still doesn't work, try this:

Plan B:

You said it was greyed out. That's quite strange. In that case, the problem should be on your computer: What I can think is that maybe some of it's services are disabled. There are several system services that are required in order for homegroup to work. It depends on those services.


1) Open the startmenu, type in services.msc
2) There's a long list. Check for Homegroup services, set them to start automatically.
3) Do a google search and look for any other services required for homegroup.

Note, it's quite a possibility they aren't all named "Homegroup ..." because they have other purposes as well.

I suspect this is your problem, this also happened to me.

If anybody's interested in the explanation how could this happen, read on... Otherwise, we are done here.


I have noticed that some system optimization software, such as IOBit Advanced Systemcare, likes to disables some of these to "speed up your PC" and this results in Homegroup sharing not working anymore. This is terrible. They switch off essential system services to boost performance. They claim them as unneccessarry, and in fact they result in some system functions not working anymore, and giving errors that make no sense. Like this one. The worst part is that the user doesn't notice these immediately. It's not like error messages start popping up. It's more like, you want to enable readyboost and the window tab is greyed out, saying the administrator disabled it. And you quite wonder how could that happen. Or it just says it failed to start or is unavailable etc.. The same can happen to filesharing and to a lot of things. I hope someone from IOBit and other system-tuning software developers read this and consider it. They should make fail-safes for this and check what it triggers.

(These system cleaners are still useful, but can be a bit dangerous. While it's safe to use them to delete junk files to free up disk space or even to disable unneccessarry autostart software, one should take care when using it's registry cleaner or service cleaner features. It can break things.)

 

[foxint]

Hi Mate

Great reply - thank you. I did what you asked. But it did not work. Homegroup remains grey.

I even had the Kaspersky guy help - but he said it was a Win problem. I have 3 PC's and 2 are good and 1 is no good. But I cannot see where the differences are.

So unfortuneatly the problem remains as before

Any other suggestions?????