Missing Network Settings - "Find Devices and Content"

I hit the same issue and here is my solution:

1. launch "Hyper-V Manager"
2. in the menu go to Action->"Virtual Switch Manager"
3. remove all entries under "Virtual Switches". (these are 3 virtual switches in my computer: Windows Phone Emulator, 802.11n Wireless LAN card, and Realtek PCIe GBE family controller)

Now go back to check if "Find device and content" shows up

Good luck!

PS. if you are using Hyper-V, remember to add those virtual switches back. Otherwise your VM won't have network connection.

I thought I'd pass this on. One of the earlier messages in this thread gave me a tip on where to look.

My problem was not quite the same, but had a similar effect. I had a W8.1 laptop networked to several other machines (W7 and XPs). I moved it to another network (for business reasons) for several days and when I tried to come back to the original workgroup, I found no settings changed BUT I couldn't connect to the other computers. "Entire Network" was not available, and the machine couldn't find the workgroup. All of the other computers could connect to each other, of course, but not to the 8.1 machine.

So I checked Windows Firewall and it was turned off (I use Comodo, which I had also turned off). But I went into the "Advanced Security" setting and found ALL the settings in the Group "Network Discovery" NOT "enabled". So I enabled all of them, and voila!

• my network came back. And all this with Windows Firewall TURNED OFF!

I've attached a screenshot to show what all these settings are. I did disable the UPnP-In rules that were not private, and I'm wondering about some of the other "public" rules, and whether or not they should be enabled. But I'll go with this for now, and I'm going to keep looking to see if I can get everything back again. At least I can communicate with the other computers on the network now.

Just changing the "Inbound Rules" worked for me, but I changed the appropriate "Outbound Rules" for good measure.

I still haven't figured out how to get my "Entire Network" and workgroup icons back in the Network window yet.

Hi, thanks for the tip, that was the first thing I tried, I simply disabled my firewall, even so, no option to share nothing, and no joy in trying to access anything.

Let's keep pushing, sometime they'll get annoyed with us and look at the problem.

Best regards.

EMontanhole;

First off - thanks for pushing this. I'm running a Surface 2 Pro and having the exact same issue as you are. It blows my mind that this is a known issue and the best MSFT can do is give us the runaround...

I've not found a solution to turn on "Find devices and Content", but I found a workaround that has allowed me to find devices on my networks.

I went to Windows Firewall and followed the link to Allow an app or feature through Windows Firewall. I looked at the settings, and saw that Network Discovery was turned off. I changed the settings to allow Network Discovery on Private networks, and am good to go.

Not sure if you've tried this or not, and also not sure if this directly addresses your problem, but I thought you might be interested.