I have a four PC network (one is a laptop). I decided to wipe a hard drive that had a bunch of duplicate music files and install W7 as a secondary OS on another computer. The install didn't go as cleanly as I had expected and when the first install of W7 on this computer happened, there was something drastically wrong. I got the taskbar, start menu and all of the icons, but the background was black. Every time I clicked on an icon, the start menu, etc, more of the screen would turn black and I couldn't read what popped up. That suggested to me that the video card drivers didn't install correctly. I wiped the hard drive, re-installed W7 and everything went smoothly and worked properly with the 2nd install.
Now, I found W7 networking (I probably should say "file sharing") to be somewhat painful. (I've only been using it a couple or three days) The first computer that got W7 installed networked fine, saw all of the other computers and shared files right well. The problem came into play when I installed W7 on the second computer. W7 requires other W7 computers to be part of a "Homegroup". That homegroup requires a password, generated by the computer creating the homegroup. No problem. Not knowing this "homegroup" stuff, I inadvertently created a homegroup on the 2nd W7 PC, too. Also, because of some pathetically slow internet speeds on the first PC, I found that disabling IPv6 would help the speeds. Well, that may be, BUT.......... the W7 computers won't network if IPv6 is disabled. I could see the other computer, but couldn't connect to it. More research. I found that even though I had shared the hard drive, W7 will only allow "folders" to be shared, much unlike 95 through XP. (I was trying to share the music and some programs on the one PC with the 2nd PC.) I had copied each "album" into it's own folder on a slave drive. With XP, this was not a problem. I just shared the entire drive, et voila, ALL of the folders on the shared drive were available to the network. W7 won't allow a person to share an entire drive, as part of that drive contains the root. One can't share root on ANY W7 drive, master, slave, etc. So, I finally figured out that I needed to share the folder with the network. Well, that posed a major problem, as I had some 800 music folders. So, being the innovative person I am, I figured that I would create a "music" folder, and move ALL of the music into that folder. Once I shared the "Music" folder, I moved a couple of albums (in their own folder) into the "music" folder and tested. Sure enough, I could now see and access the subfolders through the 2nd PC. I then proceeded to copy the remaining 798+ separate music folders into the main music folder. Things are now set up so that the 2nd PC can access ALL of the music on the 1st W7 PC. I then performed a similar action for some other downloads I had (program files). Now that I've figured it out, everything is relatively happy. That said, it was still a major PITA to get the two W7 PCs networked and communicating to each other.
