networking problems

[adamf154]

Why is windows networking so crap, I am having a lot of problems just like a lot of others but im hoping someone knows of something that might help

I have 3 pc’s I am trying to network all have the same version of windows 10 and I have enabled and changed all the usual stuff for it to be connected to the network, I haven’t done anything complicated yet, pc1 is the main pc and one of the hard drives has all my files and programs on it, and all pcs will be in different rooms but there are side by side atm as I try and get it connected properly, pc1 is wired and pc2 will be wifi and pc3 will be wired

So pc1 is seeing pc2 and pc3 when they are connected without any trouble and I can change files and move things around, pc2 sometimes sees pc1, when it does and I restart/shutdown pc2, when It loads back up pc1 is then gone, so I generally have to restart pc1 for it to connect to pc2, refreshing each network doesn’t work, pc3 so far isn’t seeing pc1 at all, and im not really bothering about connecting pc2 or 3 just now, I cant keep restarting pc1 when I want to access the files, I also don’t want to keep taking the hard drive out of pc1 and putting it back in again, I just want to be able to have pc2 and 3 connected to 1 so I can access the files and other hard drives without having to keep restarting pc's and moving hard drives

Thanks in advance for any help

[FranceBB]

When you say "Move files around", you mean using SMB Shares?
If that's the case, what I can suggest you would be to connect them with static Ip addresses and use those instead of hostnames to connect to the shared folders via SMB.

Do you also have any firewall etc or any rule set in the router that might be preventing SMB traffic?
Remember that you need at the very least port 139 and 445 in TCP to be opened for SMB to work properly.
Since you're using Windows 10, I assume you're on SMB 3 and not the legacy SMB 1, right?

To be fair, I have lots of SMB shares and I never had any issues

https://i.imgur.com/01TQ88H.png

Also it really depends on how stable your connection is.
You mentioned Wi-Fi, but I have all storages connected via Ethernet and those who access those (so my workstation) are either connected via Ethernet or via Wi-Fi (like my mobile with Android 13).
This might play a role too, so if you are going to share something from a local disk via SMB, please make sure to at the very least use 1 Gbit/s ethernet.

[adamf154]

no i just meant i can do what i want in each of the hard drives from the other pc, move to other drives, delete etc