When I initially upgraded to Windows 10 from Windows 7 all was perfectly hunky dory thank you. My Mac could see and talk to my PC and vica versa. Both machines have gigabit ethernet cards and my router has gigabit ports as well so network traffic was fast and furious. Then I made what was seemingly a sensible decision to install the "Creator" update for Windows 10 as I belive that from a security point of view it is important to install all updates and patches when they become available. Little did I know that from that moment on my Mac would no longer be able to see or connect to my PC. Further experiments on my part showed that using the wired ethernet connection my PC could see my Mac and connect to it but not the other way round. Needless to say many, far too many hours were spent turning firewalls off and back on again, chnaging the actual leads to the router etc and of course googling every conceivable phrase to describe the problem. More frustrating still was that if I used the wireless connection on the PC then suddenly the PC would appear when I browsed the network on the Mac and so for the last few months I have had to settle for that.
Last Friday though I had a few hours that I could once again devote to the problem and previous google searches had thrown up the snippet that the Creator update had wrecked the Master Browser function in Windows and a brief play with this did seem to have real promise. It's quite maddening that on Friday I did 3 things that either individually or collectively have solved the problem totally and I am now back with my full gigabit connectivity.
Firstly I discovered a post from someone that seemed to be an ex Microsoft programmer that made it clear I needed to disable something called SMBv1. SMB for those that want to know stands for Server Message Block and is a protocol that is commonly used in networking and is certainly the one used by my Mac to talk to my PC. Apparently by disabling SMBv1 it forces the computer to use the more secure SMBv2 and the even more efficient SMBv3. To do this you need to open a command prompt window with administrator prvileges and type the following 2 commands pressing enter after each one and then restarting the computer:
sc.exe config lanmanworkstation depend=bowser/mrxsmb20/nsi
sc.exe config mrxsmb10 start=disabled
Obviously what I should have done was see if this alone had solved my problem but me being me I started the process of installing the Windows 10 Creator Fall update and couldnt interupt it to check, silly boy. After the update fell over once and had to be restarted it did however install on the second attempt. The main reason for me wanting to install this update so soon after it had been released was I had noticed so many people complaining that Windows had broken the Master Browser in the previous update that I was hoping that they had fixed it in this one. A triumph of hope over experience I know. Once this had installed and I had restarted a couple of times I was keen to try my ethernet connection and it was at this moment a new problem reared its head. The ethernet connection would connect straight away but every couple of minutes it would keep the network connection but drop the internet and then the internet would come back but only for a couple of minutes before repeating the cycle.
This was a new problem, the first thing to do was to make sure the latest driver was installed which Windows assured me that the adapter already had the best driver available. I did however go onto the manufacturer of the card's website and downloaded the same driver and installed that one instead. Still the same problem, damn it. So as a last resort I found a driver that was dated 2009 and was suitable for a 64bit version of Windows XP, I forced the installation of that driver instead of the latest one and hey presto all of my network problems have been solved, yaaayyyy.
I am writing this blog whilst drinking a glass of champagne, cos I bloody well deserve it!!
