Windows 7 network neighborhood PCs not showing

Recently I have been at a LAN where only one PC was consistently showing on the list of computers instead of all six. All but one PC on the network were running various incarnations of Windows 7. Some were home edition, some were Enterprise edition and some were Professional. Some editions of Windows 7 were 64 bit. One of the 64 bit PCs was always showing in the network.

Last weekend I went to my weekly LAN where I meet with friends to talk rubbish and play network games like the previous bigger LAN where I went to.

At this weekly LAN we investigated the matter and found that Windows 7 Network Sharing Center has a setting far down on the list which is not set by default and that was preventing computers from showing on the network. It was somewhere below the 128 bit encryption. The public settings did not help, this setting had to be used as well. This setting has nothing to do with the homegroup. Once I am on my home PC again, I will check what exactly it was called and will ad a mention here.

Harddrive partition suddenly gone, doing recovery

I tried some odd software to see it it has the option to resize a partition. At this point in time I was just looking, not doing anything. This software decided to go and kill my partition, or at least make it not usable by the operating system, and it installed itself as bootloader. To make matters worse, its partitioning part just brings up a grey screen and a lot of drive activity with no indicator about what is going on. This tool is called VCOM Partition Commander version 8. Some people tell me it works fine when you boot it off a CD (provided we are talking about the same tool here). At this point in time, I do not want to take more risks of losing more data.

Last night I started the data recovery process using R-STUDIO network edition. It scanned the files all fine for recovery purposes, but unfortunately cannot recover the structure and proper filenames.