Hi
Eric,
1. There are two types of homegroup… the dirt basic type allowed in Windows 7 and the more advanced system (
all 8, 8.1.1, 10, server 12, server12r2 and hyper-v) use.
You are posting this in the Windows 7 forum but do any of these other computers run the modern systems because that changes what is and is not allowed? For example, 7 allows a single homegroup but 8 can have multiple groups for work, home, kids etc.
2. In Windows 7 you edit the homegroup setting (
join/ leave) from the 'Homegroup' tab in your control panel… note that in the case of an existing homegroup controlled from a higher system the other computer{S} must also be on and connected to the network homegroup before you can change many of these settings.
3. In a normal scenario you would connect a 7 machine to the modern system to share basic files but a network drive generally works better if the files are large or don't fit into the basic (
music, documents and images) settings allowed by 7… for example my home-7 machine is allowed to see my laptops' photos only but my laptop can access docs, music, videos and images from the 7 machine
… also
see this post for the network work around.