Fixing Problems Connecting to Other Computers on Your Network

One really annoying situation is looking for shared resources on other computers in your home network and not seeing any other computers available, let alone the resources you are trying to access. Windows networks use the browser service to maintain a list of the available computers and a list of what is shared on each computer when you operate in a workgroup environment such as the home network. Typically, this is a time-sensitive action, and if you wait just a few minutes, the list updates, and you can see your destination. You can also connect by using the path to the computer, such as \\computername\sharename, to circumvent the browser service and the potential delay imposed by the collection of available resources. In addition, you can try executing net view \\computername from a command prompt.