This has been one of the oldest computer problems to plague me on a regular basis. On a peer to peer network, file and print sharing mostly works out of the box and computers can see and access each others shared resources without any problems. Sometimes something goes wrong and do what you might, the computers can no longer see each other when you search for them by their NETBIOS names. This can happen between any two windows versions. I have had endless nightmares when this happened between two Windows XP computers or between a Windows XP computer and another with Windows Vista. These are my conclusions after trying to tackle these problems over the last 5 to 6 years.

This can happen due to a few things that you can readily check, or you can have all of those things done and still stay stuck. It is a bit of a mystery, so I have usually solved it by workarounds, since many a time some computer just stops showing after an update, or a computer  stops seeing the other computers. Searching Google shows that there are numerous other users suffering from the same problem. Here are some of the possible solutions.

• One of the earliest solutions that worked for me was to have an account with the same username and password on both/all of the machines. This however worked well during the reign of Windows XP until service pack 1. Since Service Pack 2, this solution has worked only intermittently.
• Some Internet security software written by paranoid people, block browsing your local network by default and you need to add an exception so that it doesn’t block your needed network resource.
• Vista and Windows 7 also have this feature, and you can easily change this setting from their ‘Network and sharing center’
• Your Computer browser service might be turned off or have been set up not to start automatically.  You can check/change this from Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Services > Computer Browser
• Enable NETBIOS over TCP/IP in your Network Adapter Properties.  This can be done by viewing your Network adapter properties > TCP/IP (ver. 4) Properties > Advanced > WINS and selecting the radio button, “Enable NETBIOS over TCP/IP“
• Plan B : Assign a static IP address to the computer hosting the share and access it by IP address rather than by its NETBIOS name.

If you get an authentication problem, then you can try the first solution. If that does not work, you can change settings for that particular share. (This cannot be done on the Home editions of Windows) This can be done from Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Local Security Policy .

In the Local Security Settings, under Security settings in the Left Pane… Local Policies > Security Options… double click ‘Network Access: Shares that can be accessed anonymously‘ . Here you can add your share name and click OK.

Enabling Anonymous access to Shares

Add your share name here

 

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