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Question

Sharing files on home network

Sep 20, 2014 3:54AM PDT

I am trying to get a Windows 7 Pro machine to communicate (share files) with my Windows 8.1 Pro laptop. This is a private small home network.

This used to be easy. Why is ms making this a nightmare now. It just won't work no matter what I do. I can see the names of each computer on each machine, but apparently the Windows 7 machine is "denying" access.

I disabled Avast on the Windows 7 machine. Another message says "Windows can't communicate with the device or resource". I've been trying to troubleshoot this every which way I can, and ms provides no REAL clues whatsoever.

Discussion is locked

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Answer
This is an old problem
Sep 20, 2014 4:01AM PDT

This is an old problem and dates back to at least XP, but probably existed in NT 3.1.

You need to make sure each system has a matching username and password. So for example say your Windows 7 system has a user account named "bob" with a password of "smith". You need a u/p combo of bob/smith on the Windows 8 system. There are other ways to do this, but that is by far the easiest. The whole homegroup thing is supposed to make this process easier, but I'll have to agree they didn't just miss the mark, you can't even see where the mark is from the homegroup.

You can also disable the Windows firewall on both if you have a router. While there's an argument to be made that protection only at the gateway isn't enough, for a home network it is probably sufficient. The AV program wouldn't have anything at all to do with this, so you can disable it or enable it all you want, it won't change anything.

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This is really unbelievable
Sep 20, 2014 8:55AM PDT

I finally figured out how to turn W firewall in 8.1. Why is it so hard to find in W 7? I'd rather not do this, but...why do they make it so difficult. I had been doing this for years with SP and Vista.

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They didn't
Sep 20, 2014 10:51PM PDT

They didn't. The basic non-homegroup process is exactly the same as it was in Vista, XP, 2000 and probably even earlier. It's something you're doing that's making things harder than they need to be.

Not intended as a pejorative, but I frequently run into people who take the approach of memorizing a specific method of doing something as opposed to the general process. If any step changes even slightly with that specific method, you're stuck, whereas if you know the general process you can typically figure out what you should be doing.

Some try to deride the notion calling such people a "jack of all trades, master of none" but it seems to me like you tried the opposite approach of mastering one specific way and look at where it got you. You don't need to master anything, you just need to learn enough that you can figure out the rest using deductive reasoning. For the classic car analogy... You think the people who work at those quickie oil change places are trained exactly how to change the oil on every single car model there is? Heck no! Once you know more or less what an oil pan and oil filter look like, you can apply the basic process to any make/model of car even if for some strange reason someone brings in a Ferrari to one of those places or some other car you don't see on the road every day.

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Yep Jack of all trades
Sep 21, 2014 11:15AM PDT

Master of...a couple of 'em. So where did HP put the oil pan on this computer? Been lookin' for it all day.

Haven't been able to find a way to configure the firewall to let this happen. One over at MS boards says to uninstall antivirus - not just disable it - and use another app to get rid of the 'remnants'.

Disabled the firewall on both machines for a few minutes - and no problem after that.

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Do you have a router
Sep 21, 2014 11:50PM PDT

Do you have a router for your internet connection? If so, just leave the firewall disabled on both systems. Otherwise you'll probably want to do some researching with google to find out how to poke the proper holes in the firewall to allow CIFS/SMB network traffic on the LAN.