Windows – Cannot access Seagate Central 4TB NAS from Windows 8.1 laptop

This sounds like a Sharing issue on your laptop.

click on your wireless icon -> Open Network and Sharing Centre -> Change Advanced sharing settings (in left column) and make sure that the following are on for 'Home or work' off for public;

Turn on Network Discovery Turn on File and printer sharing

That should allow 2 way sharing.

If in doubt, check this link;

Windows 7 HomeGroup: Walkthrough

Hope this resolves it.

Good luck

I've managed to find a solution of the problem.

First thing what was the problem: The one described in the UPDATE1 of the question. I've reached the max possible count of the installed system filter drivers. What kind of applications can installed filter drivers: firewalls, VPN clients, VM platforms (obviously;), some monitoring applications. In this link I've found useful information and PowerShell scripts related to filter drivers.

Solutions:

• Uninstall software that has previously installed filter drivers.
• Increase the count of the maximum allowed system filter drivers. You can do this by changing the value of the "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Network\MaxNumFilters" registry entry. I've personally set the value to 0x14 (hex). I've chose this solution.

Although I've encountered this problem when installing Hyper-V platform as you can guess this is a very generic error and it can be triggered when installing any kind of software that depends on system filter drivers (e.g. VPN clients which I've installed before the Hyper-V platform).