I hope someone can help me. I posted here several weeks ago, but nothing I do has fixed the issue, so here it is again. Hopefully someone can help...
I bought a new laptop. Currently running Windows 10 v1803. I removed my old laptop, which was running the same version of Windows, from my network and setup my new laptop with the same device name as my old one. I also updated my router settings so it would assign the MAC of my new laptop the same IP as my old one. And I shared my needed folders on the new laptop using the same names.
Almost everything is working as expected, except when I try to access my laptop from an Android device. Any Android device--either of our two cell phones or our tablet.
The Android device *can* see and access the shared laptop's folders when the laptop first boots up. But at some point, I'm then not able to see or access them anymore.
I can see and access them again if I reboot the laptop or disconnect/reconnect the wifi connection of my laptop. And there are times, after the issue starts, where it does work without me doing anything to try to fix it. But the issue always starts up again at some point. (Disabling/re-enabling wifi on the Android devices doesn't seem to have any effect when the issue is happening.)
Both the laptop and my Android devices are running a VPN (Private Internet Access). I've disabled it on all devices, but the issue persists. I've also turned off the Windows Firewall, but, again, the issue persists.
I should also point out that when the issue is occurring--when I can't see or access the laptop from the Android devices--I can still see and access the laptop from other Windows 10 PC's on my network, and am able to see and access the other Windows 10 PC's on my network from the Android devices. So, the only connections having issues at times are the Android devices to the Laptop--no other interactions are having issues.
I am not a network person, except for the basics. So I don't know what could be causing the issue as I described--where it works sometimes, and most of the time not. Everything I can think of trying would have it either work or not all the time.
I would think the issue is something specific to my new laptop, as the issue didn't exist when I still had my old laptop.
Any help anyone can give would be greatly appreciated.