Win7 networking SLOW to recognize devices on LAN

My Win7 64bit machines take up to 30-60 sec to recognize other devices on a wired gigabit network. Then, additional time to open a device’s HDD. But, once that is done, I can open sub-folders and xfer files around lightning fast. (Sometimes, I can’t find other devices at all w/o multiple refreshes).

My LAN includes a Win7 desktop, Win7 laptop, XP-Pro desktop, and a home theater media hub. I never had any trouble with XP/Vista on my LAN.

Any suggestions to speed things up will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Jack

sidestickmaster:
Hello and welcome to the forums.
I suspect that your issue is related to browser election problems which can often happen with multiple clients in a workgroup environment especially when combining different OSs. Examine the event viewer logs on all your network nodes and you will probably see some references to browser elections and possibly event logs that reference issues with some nodes being unable to obtain a list of resources from the Browse Master or the Master Browser being unavailable. These issues can be introduced when a machine that has become the Master Browser is shut down or rebooted and can often be resolved by just being aware of how the master browser in a work group environment serves like a WINS server that maintains a list of IP addresses and computer names that are used to populate the netbios information you see in nethood.
This article may help better explain what's going on. How to Determine the Master Browser in a Windows Workgroup | Scottie's Tech.Info