I’ve been moving all my home PC’s over to wireless as I reshuffle the rooms in my house. As part of this I have had a nightmare of a time with one machine being unable to connect to anything, the media centre dropping connections to the server, and other general weirdness.
I tracked it all to the Browser service and lack of decent name resolution. I have never really liked the browser service, it’s never reliable, but in this scenario, it should perform fine.
Google wasn’t a lot of help, although there were some hints. The MS Browser tools are all designed to work in a domain, not a workgroup.
What I found was that I had to DISABLE the Ethernet NIC on the machines having problems. Disconnected was not adequate. Now I had seen this in servers before, but not in a general home LAN. Retesting showed the same results.
I gave up before trying to track the browser election broadcasts, although a few packet captures showed name resolution wasn’t working correctly before the change. Event logs showed nothing useful.
So, if you have problems with your home wireless network and name resolution, disable the unused wired NIC’s and just run the wireless. All is happy now.
Next to solve the bandwidth issues.