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Hi,

I'm getting quite frustrated with what I thought was an easy task. I have 4 PC's all running under Windows XP Home SP2 on a workgroup, accessing a router, a print server and all hard wired. I recently changed the name of one of the computers on my network from unfriendly name like "abd23679h" to a more user friendly name "workshop". No problem with the name change except now I see both computers with both names but only the new named computer is accessable. If I double click on the old PC it says PC is not available. No matter which PC I choose to view network places they all show the 5 PC's instead of the 4. Until I did this change I've had no problems with the network and often add or take machines off without problems

I changed the name by right clicking "My Computer" selecting "properties" and then "Computer name" and then "change". I was then asked to reboot, and ended up with 5 computers showing in Network places.

How do I complete the name change process and get back to 4 PC's?

Many thanks

John

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Sounds like you need to flush your WINS cache. Run this command on each machine:

nbtstat -RR

If that doesn't do the trick then you can try flushing your DNS cache:

ipconfig /flushdns

And if that still doesn't work then rebooting oughta do it ;)

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If you are indeed referring to "My Network Places", that's just a glorified most recently used (MRU) of network traversal. I routinely delete things that clutter it up just like you'd delete a file. What's in there are little more than shortcuts, albeit slightly more functional than a shortcut.

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I really don't know what the interaction is with NetBIOS because I've had it disabled since the day Windows 2000 was released. I'm guessing in my circumstance that everytime I manually enter in a remote path that it plops an entry in My Network Places. Periodically I get fed up with it all and just delete them all. I would imagine that even with NetBIOS enabled the items listed are still no more than convenient shortcuts a la MRU.

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RogueSpear,

I think that they're talking about the "View workgroup computers" section, not necessarily the my network places folder. Those are just shortcuts, but the workgroup computers can't be deleted from the list.

@ amberlea,

I believe that list is generated from 1 random PC on that network, and then broadcast to the whole network. I would try what Tain suggested on all your computers, and then reboot them all, and see if that works.

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After a lot of experimenting: I fixed my problem by doing the following: I put the name back to "abd23679h" and then changed the work group name on this computer to a different work group name. The computer then disappeared from the network. I then put my "workshop" name back and joined it back to the work group. Now all the computers on the network see only the "workshop" name.

Many thanks for your suggestions.

John :thumbup

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I really don't know what the interaction is with NetBIOS because I've had it disabled since the day Windows 2000 was released. I'm guessing in my circumstance that everytime I manually enter in a remote path that it plops an entry in My Network Places. Periodically I get fed up with it all and just delete them all. I would imagine that even with NetBIOS enabled the items listed are still no more than convenient shortcuts a la MRU.

That is a matter of applying the right tweaks:

Network Places - disable recent shares

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