Win 10 pro not file sharing with other PCs.

[John Rumm]

OOI, if you plug the laptop into the network with a cable, does the behaviour change?

[Dave Plowman (News]

I've not tried that. Since it's not how I want to use it.

Pinging the cabled desktop PC gives not found (or whatever) Just as you'd expect if it doesn't show on the network menu, like everything else.

It has one other funny. I have two printers, both Wi-Fi connected. A inkjet and laser. The laptop only shows the inkjet on the devices page, but does allow you to choose the laser when printing.

[John Rumm]

It can sometimes help identify where the actual problem is - even if it is not part of the final solution.

Same as temporarily turning off windows firewall on both machines. You may not want to run that way normally, but if it starts working, then you know what to look at and reconfigure.

It's quite possible to get things that will see each other at a low level like "ping" (ICMP Echo Request and reply), but not at a higher level like SMB file sharing.

(For example a common problem on Win 10 clients trying to access older NAS devices, is that they will ping the thing but not recognise it as a file sharing device. This is due to Win 10 blocking access to older devices that don't support SMB2 or later. You can work around that by requesting that it enables SMB1 support which is off by default)

Sometimes when nothing is playing by the rules, it can be because something has upset the network stack on one machine - this can sometimes happen when uninstallers delete filter drivers or other layers that are best not messed with, or malware tries to knobble AV software or firewalls.

It can be worth trying a winsock and ip reset if you have not already:

Open a command prompt with admin privilege:

netsh winsock reset netsh int ip reset

Then restart the machine and try again.

(the above commands will do no harm, even if they don't fix it)

[Dave Plowman (News]

Seems odd the firewall on the laptop should let the desktop PC in and file share the laptop stuff, but not the other way round?

That was all covered in the fault sorting guide I found online. Even printed it out and put it in a nice booklet. ;-)

No help, but thanks. It's odd. The network page shows the laser and inkjet. They both work OK with the laptop. But Settings/Devices/Printers only shows the inkjet. On the desktop machine they both show on that page

- as I'd expect.

[Adrian Caspersz]

<snip>

Printers have their own discovery methods and drivers.

You are failing to fix file sharing. That's another protocol.

What did 'net view' return?

You've probably found this page.

PING is the first thing you need to get working.

If that doesn't work you probably have a firewall issue, the machines are on different subnets, or (outside guess) your router has a nasty 'client isolation' feature turned on.

You could use a cloud drive service as a file sharing workaround.

Probably Microsoft are trying to get you to move there...

[Robin]

Or, as I suggested up-thread, add Network Places. I've not found those to fail if the machine can be pinged (although naturally they require care as to credentials and permissions). But I admit I've largely given up the battle to maintain network discovery across all Windows machines.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I remember those!