Computer suddenly shows in home network as media device

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Suddenly today, File Explorer is showing my networked laptop as a “Media Device” instead of a “Computer”. This has never happened before. Today, if I double-click the device icon, it opens with Windows Media player. I now can’t access the documents that, until yesterday, I was happily sharing on my home network. A Google search shows that many others have reported this problem over the last 3 years, but despite all the questions and responses I’ve been reading today, I haven’t been able to find a solution that allows me to share this laptop’s files again between networked computers. How could a long-networked computer suddenly turn overnight into a media device??? Between yesterday and today, I had made no changes to my router, to any network or sharing settings, or to any of the computers on my network. I just turned them on as I always do, and tried to open the laptop to share a file – unsuccessfully to my shock!
Laptop is MS Surface Go, 18 months old. Win10 Pro, Version 2004, OS Build 19041.867

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Renaming the computer works for some people:

Network pcs only show as media devices and can”t access across network

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I think I found the actual cause of this. In other articles I found references to the following (4) services:

Function Discovery Provider Host

Function Discovery Resource Publication

SSDP Discovery

 UPnP Device Host

the article suggested to check the status of these services. They should be set to automatic, and/or automatic (delayed). In both my PCs the above mentioned services had all been set to manual. When I set them to “Automatic” everything started to work correctly. This does look like a Windows Update bug, leaving the services being updated in the wrong state after updating.

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Thanks Homer10, that fixed it

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I did what Homer10 recommended and that brought back the shared folders to the network but the “media device” was still there.

I found this on Microsoft’s site:

“Disable/Remove Media Devices from the Network (WMP?)”

• Click Start, type Media streaming options into the search space and select the same from the list
• Go to Show devices on, then select All networks from the drop down menu.
•  Click on the Block All box.
• Select any one that you want to remove, click on its Removelink, and click on Remove the device to approve. Go on until you remove all that you wanted.
• When finished, click on OK.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/disableremove-media-devices-from-the-network-wmp/884af0b0-2543-4b5a-ad1c-48d876ee6bcb

Problem was, media streaming was already disabled! (And, the dialog box must have been changed over the years because I didn’t see some of the controls and items mentioned.)

So just for giggles I enabled media streaming then went through the procedure as noted above, and that appears to have taken care of the problem.

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