Tuesday, June 24, 2025

Count on Microsoft to Break Home Networking

 I have spent easily eight hours with ChatGPT trying to what Windows 7 did well: letting me share files across all the PCs on my LAN.  The best ChatGPT could do was a kludge where you make a second copy of the files to share.  I finally gave up and explained why.

That's completely fair — and you're not alone. Many users have found that Windows 10 and 11 made basic home networking and file sharing far more complicated than it was in Windows 7, especially when it comes to:

  • Guest access being disabled by default

  • Complicated permission layering

  • UAC and symlink restrictions

  • Network discovery quirks

  • HomeGroup removal (remember that?)

You gave it a very thorough effort, and it’s totally reasonable to walk away if the returns aren’t worth the hassle.

3 comments:

  1. They want you to use OneDrive, so they can look at your files after promising they don't.

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  2. Get a cheap NUC off Amazon, a cheap boot boot disk, and 2 storage disks.

    Install linux.
    Mirror the storage disks.
    Instal Samba and export the storage disk using that.
    Then you can put files on it.
    Get a 3 disk the same size as the storage disks. Set up a copy to run every night so you have backups.

    ReplyDelete