Network shares suddenly not working?

[Electronic Punk]

I would say I have a fairly good knowledge of networks so I was a little confused when started having what I thought were network issues.

I use the same logon and password on my laptop, desktop and server in a workgroup so I can access the partitions on each freely using administrative shares i.e. \\pulsar\c$ but having installed 7 on my desktop pc these shares simply stopped working.

I initally blamed DHCP and DNS caches but other services were working fine, such as Norton Discover and Remote Desktop.

I drilled down and eventually discovered that Homegroups had infact taken over and stopped the other shares working. All my shares are on a server and I am quite happy with them being seperate, so I decided to disable this functionality by doing the following:

So open up the Network and Sharing center and over the on the right you will see 'Change advanced sharing settings'

Down the bottom you will find the option you need.

I am sure this is a great new feature for those not so network-savvy but not one I need for sure, but having access to all your music, videos and photos from all your networked Windows 7 machines is definately a great feature if you wouldn't know how to do it otherwise.

 

[Remar]

Are you not using the shared folder on each PC to store music ? I mean, I am not doing so, but I do use the shared documents folder on my server where everything I want shared is stored. music, files, etc... only time I have to use a name and password is when I want to do anything else on the other machines.

 

[Electronic Punk]

Nah basically my two workstations have nothing on and my server has a share called music.

Basically as I have the same username and password on each machine, I never get prompted for a password either.

 

[Remar]

right on bro, yeah our workstations here have nothing on them either. And I use XP for my server machine and just stick everything in the default share folder. So any machine that I do not isolate (all are isolated when anyone comes on my network) can have access by default to anything in my share folder. Works easier for me since I dont have explain anything tech to anyone in the household...lol