Windows 7 and XP network problems

[DraceEdge]

I know this is a popular topic to post about and I have reviewed other posts on this site and others about this problem, but the described circumstances never fully match my own. I have a new desktop at work that runs Windows 7. There are up to 7 other computers in our office network, all running XP Pro. I had gone through the process of turning on network discovery and all the other things that I was supposed to turn on or off. All of the computers are on the same workgroup name. For about 3 days I could bring up Windows Explorer and click on Network and it would bring up the other computers in the network. After I came back from Thanksgiving, I all of a sudden couldn't see or access any of the other computers on the network. None of them showed up on the network map. I can successfully ping the other computers and can even pick up the media streaming from one of the computers. I just can't access the files on any of them. Any thoughts? Remember, this worked before and I have not changed anything since then.

 

[torrentg]

Map the network drives to remote machine so that they show up in explorer and you'll never have use for a network map.

Try it and see what I mean.

For example:

\\remotemachinename\C$ for remote C: drive
\\remotemachinename\D$ for remote D: drive

etc...

Click the map network drive button above where you see your own C, D, etc...

 

[DraceEdge]

Well, that ultimately ended up working, and it'll work just fine for what I need. Still bugs me that all of a sudden I couldn't see the other computers. Come to think of it, I think we had this problem before even when all the computers were running XP. Mapping the network drives was the only thing that really saved us a bunch of hassle. I actually tried mapping the drives on my W7 machine before but I think I had the server computer name wrong. Thanks for the help.

 

[torrentg]

You could check services.msc by typing that in the start menu and hitting enter.

Look at

Network List Service
Network Location Awareness
Link-Layer Topology Discovery Mapper

services and see that they are set to auto and started too.