Windows 7 How Do I Delete/Modify "Networks" Created By Windows?

IanB

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Joined
Nov 4, 2011
I've been fiddling like mad for a couple of days now with a new Win7 Ultimate x64 machine "desktop", and using an old XP Pro machine as a fileserver, the last few hours getting the XP machine, which is rather old, to respond to Wake On LAN. I've been trying to track down why the DSL router is triggering it from standby mode, so I swapped to an older router than my usual one to see if it causes the same problem.

Suddenly, the Win7 machine has decided it's found a "new network" and called it the exciting moniker "network 3". I don't want a new network. I am quite happy with the old one. I cannot find anywhere in the baffling wizards etc to tell it which network I am on. It just seems to be an arbitrary decision by Win 7. It seemed to happen a while after I unplugged the DSL side of the router from the phone line, to see if it was stuff coming in from the internet waking the server, but it didn't happen immediately, so I have no idea why Win 7 suddenly decided it had found a "new" network. All the IP addresses (static) are the same, etc.

Every version of Windows seems to get more opaque and designed to prevent anyone getting "under the hood" to see what is actually going on. How do I get under the hood to delete this network that I do not want that is precisely the same computers as the old one? If I plug in another different router some time, do I get yet another "new" network?

Is there somewhere I can delete these networks? From the command line perhaps? I can find a "set up a new network" link in the Network And Sharing Center, but "get rid of this one you didn't want" doesn't seem to appear, for some reason.

/frustrated
 
Open the Network and Sharing Center. Click on the House or Park Bench and see if you can delete or merge it there.
 
Thanks for the reply Saltgrass!

As it goes, I'd found that before I saw your reply. It's kind of indicative of the baffling interface though. Click on a park bench? It's not exactly intuitive. Where are the menus? It seems menus are deprecated in new Windows, which is a pity, since flicking through all the menus is a good way to find out "what I can do in this window" on a GUI. Now it's down to just randomly clicking everything on a screen to see if it's an icon or a shortcut. It's like playing a 1990s point-and-click adventure. Awful.

Anyway, that screen didn't let me tell Windows what network I wanted to be on, it seems Windows wants to keep that decision to itself. After a couple of reboots, it decided to put me back on Network 2, and then I could delete the arbitrarily invented Network 3. It seems to be deliberately impossible to actually have any control over this process.
 
I've been fiddling like mad for a couple of days now with a new Win7 Ultimate x64 machine "desktop", and using an old XP Pro machine as a fileserver, the last few hours getting the XP machine, which is rather old, to respond to Wake On LAN. I've been trying to track down why the DSL router is triggering it from standby mode, so I swapped to an older router than my usual one to see if it causes the same problem.

Suddenly, the Win7 machine has decided it's found a "new network" and called it the exciting moniker "network 3". I don't want a new network. I am quite happy with the old one. I cannot find anywhere in the baffling wizards etc to tell it which network I am on. It just seems to be an arbitrary decision by Win 7. It seemed to happen a while after I unplugged the DSL side of the router from the phone line, to see if it was stuff coming in from the internet waking the server, but it didn't happen immediately, so I have no idea why Win 7 suddenly decided it had found a "new" network. All the IP addresses (static) are the same, etc.

Every version of Windows seems to get more opaque and designed to prevent anyone getting "under the hood" to see what is actually going on. How do I get under the hood to delete this network that I do not want that is precisely the same computers as the old one? If I plug in another different router some time, do I get yet another "new" network?

Is there somewhere I can delete these networks? From the command line perhaps? I can find a "set up a new network" link in the Network And Sharing Center, but "get rid of this one you didn't want" doesn't seem to appear, for some reason.

/frustrated


Just open regedit and just find the key under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\NetworkList\Profiles\
and delete all the unused Network names
 
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