Homegroups - why so confusing?

JDahl · Jan 13, 2014

So for the life of me I cannot set up a homegroup on two Windows 7 machines. One is my desktop with a wired connection to a netgear 7550 wireless modem, the other is a laptop with a wireless connection.

I've tried ever online tutorial out there, every commonly recommended fix, and it just won't work. After setting up the homegroup, on either computer, the second computer cannot join. I've tried it with a wireless connection, with a wired one, verified the IP addresses, triple checked every proper service was running...

The second computer always returns the message "could not set up a homegroup on this computer".

so anyways, I'm pretty much moving on. ONe thing, why go through all this trouble to set up this shared network, if I can just double click on either computer in the network map, enter the user name and password, and have all the access to the files? Seems kinda redundant to have this Homegroup feature and allow users to have complete access to the files anyways?

Or am I missing something?!

nukemaster · Jan 13, 2014

It was made for home users to make sharing easy. I personally do not like it because it gives members of the group too much control and users too little control(kind of like the basic sharing from XP home).

Setting up a workgroup and matching login(even making one just for this if you wanted) on each system works great.

Now you have to make sure the security permissions AND file share permissions match. I also recommend the user name be setup and not just a group. The reason for this is because under Windows Vista/7/8 you are a user and not part of the admin group unless elevated by UAC(unless you have that turned off and that is NOT recommended).

Example of what I am talking about. The share and security permissions match and I use a login and not just a group.

JDahl · Jan 13, 2014

Nukemaster,

Thanks, I think I will look into this. I really only want to accomplish one simple thing, and that is this, my wife takes a ton of digital pictures, but isn't that organized, not good at backing up, and doesn't really take much care in what her picasa instant edits are doing to the resolution. Since these are family pictures, I really want to have more control over backing them up. I wanted to be able to tell her "when you take pictures off the camera, just put them in this folder." Since she is the primary user of the laptop, I could just access the pictures, get them on my desktop, and properly archive/back them up.

I'll have to do some reading up on this, any good tutorials out there?

nukemaster · Jan 13, 2014

I have not seen many on the topic because everyone has things a bit different.

I would make an account with her login and password on your system. Then on her system set a network share to connect on startup to your pc. A shortcut of the desktop called Digital Camera Images would make it very easy to find.

If you want it to be even more transparent and your system is always on you can make her Pictures folder located on your system(location tab).

Example Image, yes d : is a share on my media center. I actually have NO files on my system all of them are on my media center for easy central backup(since it is always on anyway). A downside to my approach is I can not even get a desktop without my media center on(again, not an issue so far, but after sleep sometimes a log out and in is needed).

A very big word of warning on how network shares are under Windows.

If she simply connects to you with a mapped drive and deletes a image, it is GONE on both ends(if you remove it on your end this is not an issue), the recycle bin does not apply to network shares.

If you tell Windows to use a network share as a user folder(location tab), it will keep deleted files on a recycle bin on her system.

I have also used symbolic links to allow a network folder to appear as a local folder on a hard drive(the same do not delete applies to this method.). This allows some games on my main system to use files from the other system(good for games that do not save in the documents folder).

I do not recommend anything as complicated as my setup because again my system is fully dependent on the other system for all my files desktop documents. For me this was the best way to avoid needing file duplication and make backup of multiple systems much more easy.

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Homegroups - why so confusing?

JDahl

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JDahl

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