I've got a PC I'm running Media Center on. When I'm on my work computer, eventually the computer upstairs running Media Center goes to sleep. When this happens, I can't acess files on that computer over the network. If I run all the way upstairs (2 flights) and wake the computer up, I can then come back down and access the files. I've got into the Power Management tab of the Properties dialog of the wireless adapter on the computer upstairs. I do have "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" unchecked and have rebooted several times since unchecking that box. Any idea on other things to look into? The wireless NIC on that card is a Linksys WMP600N. The motherboard is an Asus P5LD2.

If your NIC and mainboard support Wake on LAN you could try configuring that. Otherwise your only option is to set your computer to never Sleep and never Hibernate.

The thing is, I had it working for like a day. I'd open up the window in Windows Explorer which showed all the computers available on the network. I'd refresh and the computer upstairs would show up in the window. But, I'd have to wait like 20 seconds, about the time amount of time it takes the computer to wake up, before I could successfully access files. Then there was a day where I had to reboot my computer downstairs because of Windows Updates. When the downstairs computer came back up, I couldn't see any other computers on the network at all. The way Windows "magically" does, like 12 hours later, I could see all the Windows XP machines on the network. But, to this day I still can't see the upstairs Windows 7 machine when it is sleeping. I am wondering whether the motherboard supports it. It doesn't say explicitly in the motherboard manually. But then, I got it working that one time. Just no idea what's going on. I wonder if the same day that I had to do the Windows 7 updates on the downstairs computer which made my network act weird if those updates were also applied to my upstairs computer? And, that's why I can't access it when it sleeps now? But, really got no idea.

Hi Levander, I will give you some suggestion below: 1 Try to perform a Device Clean Boot to see if the issue occurs. 2 Try to ping the computer upstairs, if you can ping the computer, use the following format to access the shared folder: \\ipaddress\folder 3 As you said the issue didn’t occur before installing Windows Updates on the Windows 7 computer downstairs, you can try to perform restore the computer from the restore point without installing Windows Updates. Hope it helps.