I’ve been trying unsuccessfully for a couple of days to get my Android tablet to browse network shares from my Windows 7 PCs. No matter what I did or how many different clients I tried none of them would connect. After messing with settings on both the tablet and my PCs even my iPad would not connect to any shares even though it was previously working. The rest of my PCs would open the shares just fine. Through troubleshooting the iPad I came across an article on Stratospherix‘s website based on a Microsoft knowledge base post that mentioned a registry setting sometimes needed changed to allow additional network clients to connect to Windows shares. I’m not even entirely sure this is what fixed my issues but after changing this on one of my machines I was able to connect from both the iPad and my Android tablet.
Here’s the registry key to add:
- Click Start, click Run, type regedit and then click OK.
- Locate and then click the following registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters - Click Edit, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
- Type IRPStackSize, and then press ENTER to name the value.
(The name is case-sensitive) - Click Edit, and then click Modify.
- Click Decimal and in the Data Value box, type 30, and then click OK.
- Restart your PC and then re-try to connect with the app.
Update: 1/16/2012 – I tested this on another PC and can confirm that this fixed my connection issues. I was not able to connect to another PC on my network on either my iPad or Android tablet. I added the registry key, rebooted and was immediately able to connect both devices. I still had issues using ES File Explorer and credentials that included special characters. If I changed the password to one without special characters I was able to connect but with special characters it would give a login failure. Other Samba clients like AndSMB or Astro worked with the special characters in the password.