Name your PC using emojis: Is this a recipe for connectivity issues?

Back in October 2017, the Windows 10 and the Fall Creators Update introduced a new emoji keyboard which made adding emojis to services such as Twitter, Facebook and other similar apps extremely easy.

While this made non-verbal communication all the easier on social media, the recent Windows 10 May Update has made it so that you can now name your PC using emojis.

But wasn’t this one of the things you shouldn’t do?

A lot of the users who’ve discovered this feature started commenting on whether or not this may lead to connectivity problems with their networks, and for good reason.

Traditionally, there are a few rules when naming a computer, which include not using spaces, lowercase letter or using special characters.

The reasoning behind all this is that certain networks will only recognize your device as long as it has at least one uppercase character, and using percent signs, dots, commas and slashes are known to be common causes for network connectivity issues.

Of course this also depends on the hardware settings of your router, such as whether it does only frontend or backend checks to the data you are sending it.

For example, some users managed to successfully connect with an emoji-named PC by sending the emoji bytes directly via an HTTP request and not through the web UI, but this was only possible on a router that only checks the frontend content.

Are you experiencing connectivity issues? These quick tips will help you avoid them in the future.

What does this all mean?

Some users found the new feature to be rather amusing, and they consider that being a network administrator and seeing a PC named ❤??? would spur a few giggles.
However, other situations may not be all that funny, such as when you want to see who is using up all the bandwidth and you can’t figure out who ??? or ??? may be.

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