Windows 7 cannot see other computers workgroup

Thanks for your feedback. No problem using Edge and Outlook. Adaptors both wireless and Ethernet working okay. Does any body know any other ways to test, diagnose or fix the problem? This thread is locked. You can follow the question or vote as helpful, but you cannot reply to this thread. I have the same question Report abuse. Details required :. Cancel Submit.

Hi, Thank you for posting your query in Microsoft Community. If the problem is not fixed, you can contact support. The Computer Browser service maintains an updated list of computers on the network, and it supplies this list to computers that are designated as browsers.

If this service is stopped, the list is neither updated nor maintained. If this service is turned off, any services that explicitly depend on it do not start. Need more help? Expand your skills. Get new features first. Was this information helpful? Yes No. Thank you! Any more feedback? The more you tell us the more we can help. Can you help us improve? But then I saw network discovery is off I transferred files etc. After reinstalling, rebooting etc.

But not the XP PC's. It's set to "work" and the computer name, description and workgroup name are all set correctly. Windows 7 has something new called a Homegroup.

This makes sharing between other Windows 7 pc's easy but causes problems with non Windows 7 pc's. Google how to turn off and disable your Homegroup and you should be fine. After trying everything including all of the suggestions in this post, I finally got it to work for me. Hope this helps. It was bizarre, as I was able to browse by computer name for the past year, suddenly the past week or so I have not been able to. I believe it may have been from a recent Microsoft security update??

I also just added a computer description, clicked okay, now I can browse by computer name. Before I did what was mentioned above, I was able to browse by ip address just fine. A Printers recognized by both the Quad and the 6-core computers. So that's it. No reliable network, file sharing or file transfer possible.

Like a bad date, at best it's on again, off again. Help please. Rant for the day: Why has the ease of networking in Win NT 4.

Same exact situation as you, and yes, you are right. It's infuriating actually - more so when my Mac has no issue with this whatsoever - it'll correctly asks you to define the user and password for the XP share. It gets you to make things work, in the wrong way - which is unfortunately what MS presumably wanted to get away from.

Your share has absolutely no security whatsoever. You can of course only allow READ suggested to protect from modifications, but not access Hope there's a specific answer to this - answers like "give EVERYONE full control" is likely the opposite result MS wants its user base to do - hence all the hoops to jump around with networking and trying to apply "secure by default".

Obviously its not working and without clarity, your users will do what they will do - making all this security effort a waste. I've had the same problem, and I found that changing the workgroup name on the Win7 computer to something else, and then changing it right back to the original name fixes the problem.

It seems that changing the workgroup name is forceing the computer to run a "network discovery" process of some sort. I suppose that the poster above who changed his Win7 description to get it to work in doing so also forced the Win7 computer to run this process. All of this while "automatic network discovery" is set to on. So it appears the Win7 computer doesn't fully try to discover the network automatically in all cases. In my case, I had made what I thought were minor changes to the network - I replaced the ethernet card in the XP machine and had to download a new driver to get it working.

But not vice versa until I changed the workgroup name and then changed back on the Win7 computer. Hopefully, this post will get MS to figure out what is truly happening when you change a workgroup name, that apparently DOESN'T happen even with automatic discovery set to "on". Come on guys - help us out here!!! After reading pages and pages of basically the same issue, dating back to early last year, you would think MS could recognize that they blew this one.

Yes I have just been fighting the same problem. And it magicaaly sees, but still can't access, the other systems once in awhile. This is soooo much fun. It should not be this difficult, and certainly seems like a step backwards. I had big problem to add 3 new computers with windows 7 to the existing network with computers who are running windows XP. NOTE: in order to share file all the systems in the network must be configured to either home or work.

Step 4: right click my computer goto properties choose change setting option which is under the computer name,domain work group setting. Well I have the same problem of losing access to the computers on my lan in a workgroup with a win7 home netbook.

Works for about a month then stops seeing the workgroup computers. It's setup for the same workgroup as all the other non win7 computers and nas boxes. I've tried the suggestions of renaming then renaming it back again, adding a discription of the computer, stopping homegroup services from running, turning off the internet prodical 6, etc and none of these have started it working again.

I ran LanScan, on another computer when I couldn't see the workgroup, and it shows the netbook is not reporting the workgroup name that is setup in Win7 home. All the other computers and NAS boxes are reporting the correct work group. The only way I have been able to get it to work again is to restore the drive with a backup from a time when it was working with the workgroup.

I have a HTPC that is running Window 7 Ultimate and it lost the workgroup for a short time then got it back without me doing anything and it been fine so far. So I'm at a loss for a fix that isn't doing a restore about once a month. Wish I knew what was changing and the cause of the change. Update: I even upgraded it to Ultimate from Home hoping it might help solve the problem.

I have two Win 7 machines. A netbook and a desktop. The desktop lost the workgroup once in a time span of a year or more, but it came back without me doing anything. The netbook is an on going problem. The one difference between the two is the netbook connects to other networks besides the home lan.

My work's wifi is the most frequent other network connection I use which is basically a public wifi. Lately when the netbook was seeing the workgroup at home in the evening and morning before work. I went to work, used the public wifi at work and then when I got home I couildn't see the workgroup. Both wifi networks were setup for auto connect. For a few days I was able to get the workgroup back by first deleting with work network from the Manage My Wireless Connects list and rebooting.

The next time I got it back by making my home network first in the list. The next time these two actions didn't bring the workgroup back. I'm happy to have found this forum. I was able to see every device from any of the computers.

I recently added a Windows 7 laptop and for a while, I had no problems with invisible devices in the network. I tried several attempts including adding a lmhosts file and using a WINS server. No attempts worked reliably. The suggestion to disable IPv6 on the Vista and Windows 7 computers works for me. Thanks to the poster and thanks to internet searching.

I see you're all having a lot of trouble connecting workgroups together. I've been working IT at a university and three law firms for the last 6 years, and I've had to deal with this problem quite often. I suggest:. Here's my experience: I tried to add a win 7 home premium wireless to a mixed Vista and XP workgroup. All the solutions in this thread has not worked for me. Re-installing win7 x64 from Technet DVD. Will see what happens then, see my own thread on this from yesterday.

One thing I kinda notice on another WIN7 PC, there seems to be two different things happening when looking at computers in the network window, first the progress bar move along while finding the local computer, then it pauses and then the progress bar moves along again as the other computers are displayed in the network window.

On the WIN7 PC that shows no other computers, the progress bar does not seem to do this second thing. Well, I re-installed the complete win7x64 ultimate from technet DVD on the computer which had been upgraded from WIN7x64 home premium to Win7x64 Ultimate, and lo and behold, I immediately can see all devices on the network.

Go figure! I have a windows server, vista pc both wired and W7 laptop wireless. The wired pcs could see each other but not the laptop and the laptop could not see the wired pcs.

I could connect to all pcs by computer name but nothing I did would get the wired pcs to show up on the laptop until I bridged the LAN and Wireless connection and now every one see every one, no isses. I tried everything everyone listed here, however my 6 win7pro pc's continue to only see the win7 pc's. The XP PC's and and servers can see everything including the win7 pro pc's.

I've changed the workgroup to something else and back again. The only thing I could do to get this to wok somewhat was to edit the host file on the win7 pc's and enter the ip addresses of the core machines, i.

Once I did this I could manually map drives to the unseen computers.. I was having the same issue and resolved it by following the steps in Microsoft KB The article is listed as a fix for XP computers that could not view other workgroup computers but it worked for my WIN7 machines also. We are now able to see the XP computers fine. You can back up the registry key before making any changes. My problem is that I can see the other computers in my network but Windows 7 will not let me access them.

I have browsed through the suggestions in this posting and have tried all of them without success. I even bought a book on the subject but the guy refunded my hard earned pension money after acknowledging it didn't achieve anything. This is my only criticism of 7, it has proven to be the most time consuming challenge when it comes to networking.

I am now going to attempt setting a Static IP Address but it would help if someone could take me step by step through this procedure as I have no idea how to go about it. Can you give more details about your situation? What is the exact error are you receiving when you try to access the shares from a WIN 7 computer? I had a similar problem, I could see all windows 7 computers but none of the others. Here is how I solved it:. Click on "Computer Name" tab.

You need to change that. Click on Change, enter the name of your network or workgroup and click ok. Restart your computer and you will see all the computers in the workgroup, including the XP ones. My problem was similar Restored Windows 7 homegroup. Everybody having problems accessing computers with different version of Windows via their home workgroup, should carefully read these tutorials. For the rest of the details, check out these three detailed tutorials.

Cheers Bruce. I like many here spent a lot on time this. Please read the thread there is a lot stuff here. In short if your workgroup has both Windows 7 and Windows XP, it may or may not work.

I tried dozens of things and getting workgroup to work doesn't work for me. It occurred what I wanted was to be able to transfer files from one computer to another and not the 'workgroup' functionality.

I am offering this as a possible alternative for people in a mixed Windows network. Hello, i went through the whole topic.. My firewall showed that it was OFF but I still could not connect to the machine. I clicked "Use Recommended Settings". Instead of allowing it to turn on I selected "Turn off Windows Firewalls" on the private and public networks. Do not allow windows to turn the firewall back on, let it turn it self off again even though it already reads "off".

This basically reset my firewall and I was suddenly able to connect to the troublesome machine from other computers. Hopefully that will help others with similar problems.

Yet again, a firewall was the issue. I've spent hours doing the above steps, I learned all the keyboard shorcuts, and could change all settings within minutes towards the end, thats how fast I became in the end, but had no luck all machines could see the internet but not each other What Lee Binder posted is the BEST information on this subject in this whole discussion, it should be voted as the "answer".

I had a functioning, working, network connection to the rest of the WinXP computers on my network at work, I had could view the computers, connect with login credentials, and transfer files no problem.

One day I couldn't view any of them. I checked network discovery, tried the 'changing the workgroup name and switching it back' trick, turned off IPv6, used ipconfig to reset dns, and restarted multiple times to check if the problem still existed. It did. It seems like everyone here was having trouble getting initial connectivity up. I already knew I had a connection that was working, I just needed a way to troubleshoot it to see what broke.

All I needed was to just scroll down a little bit more, and there's his guide. Thank you Lee, you provided what dozens of others who posted above could not. It deserves to be posted at the top as the "answer" so others can find it easily, and don't have to scroll through lines of reply's and discouragement until they decide to go looking elsewhere as I did.

I'm saving this as a word doc for future troubleshooting. As chuck3 and others have found, if you've gone through all the configuration settings for xp and 7 and still no joy, you may just need to change the workgroup name on all pcs to something else, even though they're already the same. This seems to allow the computers to all see themselves and each other again.

In my situation, my win 7 pc could only see itself when looking at workgroup computers. No computers were listed under the workgroup name on the xp box. Just changing both computer workgroup names to mshome fixed it.

I have had other situations where rebooting the router solved the same apparent issue, and certainly all the other configuration settings need to be right, but changing the workgroup name has to be on your checklist. On win 7, I turned off password protected sharing and turned off homegroup. Then one morning, after one of those long updates the night before to the Win7 machine, the Win 7 computer could no longer see any other computers in the workgroup and while the others could detect the presence of the Win7 computer they couldn't browse.

I tried every other suggestion here but this was the only thing that worked!!!!! I manage to fix my "Win7" only can see other win 7 on my network. Maybe somebody have same problem with me, which I never realize that my network problem came from "non-PC terminal", and its derive from My Playbook every time connected to my network with file sharring turning "on".

Somehow BB Playbook claim as masterbrowser, which I got it from other forum. It can also happen to other device in your net-work aside from playbook.

At lease this open my eye to search forum for each device connected, not only PC Forum. File sharing is universal networking operation. I've just fixed a problem for a customer whose PC could see but couldn't access other PCs on a workgroup but was successfully sharing files itself. I tried most of the suggestions here to no avail. Setting it to 'Automatic' and starting the service fixed the problem straight away. I have spent countless hours going back to when I just the mini and and a small fortune signing up with every Dell trick to part me from money and still DO NOT have an answer.

I can get the either the XPS15 to see the mini and libraries and files but then the can't see the either laptops files or will just see one of the laptop files or the whole thing will mysteriously reverse with the being abel to the laptops but the laptops not seeing the Home networking was so much better with XP. One of the Dell techs suggested I just type in the ip address of the computer's files I want to see into the Start search box everytime I turn on one of the laptops.

Solved it. My original situation For me, everything was running super smooth. I filled in the Computer Description, and everything just came up, doesn't even require a reboot as in renaming a workgroup. This needs to move to the top of the list -- Computer Description mandatory in Windows 7. Certainly will change my future habits in setting up, regardless of OS -- no more boxes left blank. The core problem is far deeper than simply changing names back adn forth, and thats really no solution at all, its a patch, i prefer not to have to do to 5 machines every time i turn around or reboot.

I think for Microsoft, this must be really embarrassing for them. I mean, really, is Windows ready for networking??? Gosh No What a novel idea. So Windows 7 comes along and everything to do with networking and discovery is turned off by default. Who is the ignoramus that figured that out?? I thought that was the whole idea?? Yet we have to bounce around as MS suggests to try this and that in order to manipulate it to work.

I doubt that most home users wouldn't be able to know what to do. As an ITAdmin, this becomes a huge waste of valuable time. Win Xp just "worked" in so many ways. I cannot begin to count the hours I have wasted getting Win7 to play nice. Another one of their programming nightmares that make everything that was simple, almost impossible.

Paying for this frustration just does not make any sense at all. I guess you are trying to see select XP computers in a workgroup. I am also assuming you have enabled file sharing. If not do it. It will be something like To connect this XP to the win 7 machine, right mouse click on "computer" in the start menu and select map network drive. Assign a drive letter to the XP computer.. Make sure you have also selected re-connect on log on. You will have really fast access to that networked PC.

Do the same with other XP, Linix or Windows machines. If Linux you must enable samba. This is a fail safe an proper method of getting around he pesky and annoying connectivity problems of Windows 7 and 8 with previous versions of Windows. I lost about ten hours of my life trying to figure out why my network drives suddenly and inexplicably stopped working.

Of course, to complete the technically challenging fix you have to switch it off and switch it back on again! Win 7 can't see others but xp can see all. Workgroup name was same on all pc's, everything enabled sharing, network disc ect. Restart pc, change name again to mach others names on rest of PC's, restart again an that's it.

This resolved my problems. Changed the name of the workgroup in all computers, also changed the names for each computer. Office Office Exchange Server. Not an IT pro? Windows Client. Sign in. United States English. Ask a question. Quick access. Search related threads. Remove From My Forums. Answered by:. Archived Forums. Windows 7 Networking. Sign in to vote. As the title says I can't see any computers in my workgroup.

My network card seems to work fine, and I can connect to the internet just fine. Its on a wired LAN mbps and I check the workgroups and they are setup correctly.

That didn't work for me. I'm also using all Windows 7 drivers from Microsoft, should I go download the Vista drivers for all my hardware?

Wednesday, March 18, PM. Hi, I suggest that you enable Network Discovery. Marked as answer by Mark L. Ferguson Wednesday, March 25, PM. Friday, March 20, AM. Proposed as answer by caseuswayne Thursday, January 13, AM. Tuesday, May 12, PM. I have the same problem. I have got the network discovery working and am not in a homegroup. I am spending a disproportionate amount of my leisure time trying to make windows 7 do what mac osx, windows xp windows vista and ubuntu can do without me opening a help file.

Has anybody got their copy to see a workgroup?