New Win11 Laptop -- Does not access NAS Shared Folders

[Comp55years]

I assume that by "Notebook" HP really means "Laptop" - I bought a new HP laptop with 17 inch display, i5 processor, 1TB SDD, 16 GB RAM, no Ethernet port. Wi-Fi speed up to 1.2 Gbps. 1 Thunderbolt USB-C, 2 "standard USB-A ports.I have a fairly "big". Wi-Fi Internet connection speed via speedtest.net is 400 Mbps. Local Wi-Fi speed is also 400 Mbps. 

I have a fairly extensive number of connected storage and computer & entertainment devices connected to my home network via Gigabit Ethernet and Wi-Fi. There are 3 NAS (Network Attached Storage.... boxes that hold hard disks that are connected to my network to store various entertainment content  like music, movies, TV shows, books, audiobooks, comics, graphic novels, photos, my writing, and all my wife's "stuff". There are 10 Hard Disks in 5 RAID pairs (2 drives hold identical information for redundand storage to protect against failure of an HDD). All the devices in the house can access the content on the 3 NAS units via shared folders. No drive letters are set for any of the NAS units. And the IP addresses are not fixed so they may have a new IP address after a power failure (uncommon, but it does happen once in a while). Using shared folders means the IP address changing is meaningless to all the devices accessing the NAS units. As soon as power is restored, all devices can access content on all the NAS devices. The list of devices that operate fine with this set of NAS drives:

- Windows 10 Laptop with Wi-Fi connection

- Windows 11 Desktop with Ethernet connection

- 4 FireTV streaming sticks

- 2 Nvidia Shield Android streaming devices

- Lenovo Android Tablet

- 4 Smart TV interfaces (1 FireTV built-in, 3 Android/GoogleTV)

- 2 Blu-ray Disc Players

- 2 Android Phones

I have enabled SMB and NFS for all 3 NAS devices. For the 2 Netgear NAS units, DLNA is also enabled, but DLNA only works with video, photos, music, comics, and other "entertainment" file formats. DLNA ignores most document types like txt and doc/docx files, spreadsheet files, etc. I believe this are enough varied playback devices operating properly with the NAS setup to indicate there is nothing wrong with the setup I have for the 3 NAS devices (2 NAS devices are made by Netgear, 1 is made by Synology). The NAS devices have all been new starting in 2019 with one, and adding another in 2020 and the third was added in 2022. So I have 6 years of experience with using these NAS units without problems.

Which brings me to the HP Laptop we just purchased. It does not connect to any of the NAS devices with SMB or NFS. The HP will connect to the 2 Netgear NAS devices via DLNA but I only see the "entertainment files" and not any of the documents or text files so DLNA can't be used for backup and such.

The question is: Why won't the New HP Laptop connect to any of the 3 NAS devices with SMB and/or NFS?

The Laptop Wi-Fi is setup as a Private Network as it is with other computers that access the NAS drives. I even enabled SMB 1.0 in Windows 11 just to see if that made any difference... nope, still no connection to any NAS device (normal SMB versions are 2.0 and 3.0, which are enabled in Windows without having to change any settings). The small window that opens when the Laptop fails to connect to the NAS devices says: "Windows cannot access \\NASname. Check the spelling, otherwise there might be a problem with your network. To try to identify and resolve network problems, Click Diagnose" There is a "Details" option in the window. Clicking that shows this: "Error Code: 0x80070035 The Network Path was not found". When you search for that error code by number, the result is simply "The Network Path was not found".  Clearly, the network path DOES exist and is being used by all the other devices listed above. Only this Laptop is refusing to connect.

Settings in the HP Laptop:

Private Network Discovery - ON    (OFF for Public Networks)

Setup Network Connected Devices Automatically--checkbox checked "yes"

Private Network File and Printer Sharing - ON   (OFF for Public Networks)

Public Folder Sharing - OFF

Password Protected Sharing - OFF

128 bit encryption (recommended)

All 3 NAS devices are "seen" by the Laptop when you open File Explorer and click the "Network" in the left navigation pane. You do not get the "could not connect" error until you click on any of the NAS devices. The laptop knows they are there, but will not connect. The 2 Netgear NAS devices with DLNA in addition to SMB and NFS also appear as Multimedia devices. but the Synology NAS has no DLNA option so it only appears as a network device.

[Comp55years]

I forgot to mention in the first post, one of the things I tried was disabling Microsoft Defender (anti-virus, anti-malware) to see if that would allow connection to the NAS devices... no, it did not help at all. Still unable to connect without Microsoft Defender working. No other anti-virus was installed (I fully deleted McAfee that was pre-loaded by removing a remaining McAfee folder after doing Uninstall. So I am not being blocked by Microsoft Defender.