I have been sharing my wife's hard-wired printer over our home wi-fi network for over a year with no problems. Suddenly 2 days ago, my computer no longer showed her \\Computer\Printer as an available printer on my computer, though her computer still shows it as a "Shared" device, and she can print just fine. Prior to this happening we had made no changes to either computer, although I think (not 100% sure) that an automatic Windows Update had been put on my computer the night before this happened.

Her computer runs Windows 8, mine Windows 8.1. I have spent the better part of the last 48 hours trying to get our 2 computers to recognize each other on the network without success. When I try to "Add a "Printer on my computer, I get an error message saying that that printer cannot be found. I have also tried to set up a "Homegroup" and share the printer through that, but when I create the Homegroup on my computer, her computer cannot recognize it, and thus will not let her computer "Join" the Homegroup. When I delete the Homegroup from my computer and then try to create one from her computer, I get an error message which says "A Homegroup Cannot Be Created on This Computer".

As a last resort, I tried to do a "System Restore" on my computer, using a Restore Point from about a month ago when everything was working fine, but it still did not show her computer/printer as being available.

Can anyone help me with this?

Verify you computer can see/communicate with the server. From a command prompt type
ping servercomputername
and see if it gets replies.
If replies then see if you can see any shares on the server. From metro think you can type \\servercomputername
it should show any shared resources you have access to including the printer.
Dont' have a win8 machine handy but works on 7 should work on 8

Thanks, UMust,

When I ping wife's computer I get replies. However, I don't understand what you are suggesting I do in your 2nd paragraph. Could you be a little more specific? What did you mean by "metro"?

Thanks

From your machine, press the windows key and r to bring up a run prompt. Type \\yourwife'scomputername and press enter. Tell us what you see.

Problem solved. Thanks guys!

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Problem solved. Thanks guys!

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You're supposed to tell us what you did to fix it....

I don't really know. After I pinged my wife's computer, all of a sudden her computer was available on mine. I really don't know how this worked out, or why it happened in the first place.

It's a feature.