We currently have 2x Win8.1 Pro workstations on our network (all others are Win7 Pro) which are here in our IT Department (mine and a colleague). The other day I was trying to connect to the other Win8.1 machine and look at the Device Manager remotely from my machine to look get some info and I get this error:

I confirmed that WinRM, Plug and Play and Remote Registry were all running.  All other parts of remote Computer Management are accessible (Scheduled Tasks, Event Viewer, Services, Users/Groups).  It is just Device Manager that has an issue.  Further troubleshooting determined that my colleague had the same issue trying to connect to Device Manager on my machine.  We can still pull up Device Manager on Win7 machines (read-only mode, of course), but I have discovered that Win2012R2 gives us the same error and Win2008R2 gives us a similar error, just "Access Denied" instead of "remote communications is not available at this time", even using Domain Admin credentials.

Is this a new "feature" of Win8.1/2012R2? Or am I missing a setting/permission somewhere?  It seems a pain to have to logon locally to a given machine, just to check what model video card/NIC/DVD a certain machine has.

Any info would be helpful.

Thanks,

Eric

Hi Eric,

Check this group policy on your Remote desktop host.

it's under Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\System\Device Installation and it's called "Allow remote access to the Plug and Play interface".

If you disable or do not configure this policy setting, remote connections to the Plug and Play interface are not allowed.

Regards,

D. Wu

Didn't help.  Wouldn't this setting affect Win7 as well?  The policy setting says "at least Windows Vista".  I can still remotely browse the Device Manager on Win7 machines.

E

Hi E,

Refer to the answer of this thread about same issue, it says Microsoft responded with "Remote access to PnP was disabled completely in Windows 8 and cannot be re-enabled.  That's why you're seeing this behavior." However since we cannot reproduce this issue and there is no article about this, we still cannot confirm that, but it does seem like same issue did exist in that time.

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/f68b2c33-e58a-4bdf-aee9-283e1306be5f/remote-device-management-update-for-windows-2012-server?forum=winserverhyperv

Could you please check if your system is up to date, and disable your firewall temporarily for good measure.

By the way, as mentioned in that thread, PowerShell might help you workaround this issue.

Regards,

D. Wu