Windows 7 Can't change network from Public to Home on Win 7 Home Premium

[haggis999]

Every year I set up a temporary wired network of 3 laptops for helping my camera club to adminster its annual international photographic competition. A back end MS Access database is stored on a Win 7 Home Premium laptop and this is accessed by two Win XP laptops running a front end Access application. The network is connected via a 5-port Fast Ethernet switch. There is no router and no Internet access, as this is not required.

All has been well for several years until I tried to add another machine to the network. This laptop runs Windows Vista and can see all the other machines on the network but it fails to connect to the relevant shared folder on the Win 7 laptop.

The network is shown as Unidentified and Public on my Win 7 machine. I suspect that this may be the cause of my problem but the various ways I have found online for forcing it to a Home network type have all failed.

Help would be very gratefully received. I have a deadline to meet!

David

 

[Trouble]

In your unique situation where there is no router / default gateway, the best thing you can do is....
First, configure the machines so that they are positively on the same subnet (whatever private reserved address schema you choose to use). Without a default gateway you are going to have a problem messing about with the public / private (home, work, etc.,) stuff, so just ignore it and I'll assume that since there is no router involved there is no DHCP server on the network handing out IP addresses, so statically assigning them is the way to go and don't rely on APIPA for addressing.
Now, just stop relying on the computer browsing service to see things and configure your shares on the client machines to use the IP address of the host machine instead, something like
Link Removed
Map a network drive to that on your client machines and configure the Access Frontend .mdb to point to the mapped network drive.

You say that the Vista machine "sees but fails to connect to the relevant shared folder".
Are you getting an error? Are you being prompted for a password?
If it's a password thing, then make sure you use the
MachineName\UserName
Password
Format when connecting from the Vista to the 7 machine
If it's an error other than that try mapping the network drive as I indicated above it is likely just a NetBIOS issue / Computer Browser Service issue.

 

[haggis999]

I have indeed set up this temporary network using static IP addresses.

The Vista machine displays various folders on my Win 7 machine but if I click on the primary folder I get the error message,

Windows cannot access \\DAVID-PC\CompData
Check the spelling of the name...
​

I get similar errors when clicking on anything other than public folders. The use of password access control has not been enabled.

I'll will give your network mapping solution a try and report back soon.

 

[haggis999]

I've just tried mapping \\DAVID-PC\CompData in Windows Explorer on the Vista machine and got an 'Access is denied' error.

 

[Trouble]

That is why I suggested that you stop using the NetBIOS Name and switch to the IP Address instead.

So instead of Link Removed
it would be
Link Removed

 

[haggis999]

Sorry, I had a senior moment...

What I meant to say was that I tried Link Removed

 

[Trouble]

Access denied would have to do with security credentials and you should be getting prompted for a user name and password
You may want to check Control Panel-> Credential Manager to see if you have erroneous credentials stored for that connection. Those cached credentials can sometimes be an issue.

Additionally you should be able to work around this issue by creating a user with the same, identical username and password as the one logging onto the Vista machine, on the Win7 machine and make sure that, that user has the appropriate permissions to the shared resource.. You don't have to log onto the 7 machine as that user but it's handy if he's there with the correct permissions to the share.

Additionally try avoiding blank passwords for your users on all machines as the newer versions of Windows doesn't seem to like that much when it comes to network sharing.

 

[haggis999]

The Vista laptop doesn't appear to have a Credential Manager. The Win 7 laptop does but none of the entries seem too relevant, though there is a Generic Credential called virtualapp/didlogical.

However, creating a new user on the Win7 machine, with the same username and password as the one logging onto the Vista machine, seems to have done the trick.

I can't thank you enough for this utterly non-intuitive but effective solution!!

David

 

[Trouble]

utterly non-intuitive but effective solution!!

It is what it is, I suppose.
Just glad to hear that you've managed to get it working.
AND
Thanks for posting back and updating your thread with that information.
Regards
Randy