My partner’s sister has had a nice new Windows 7 netbook for Christmas which is set up wirelessly on their hub to access the internet. She’d like to copy files across the network from their Windows XP desktop system.

As far as I can work out (over the phone) File and Printer sharing is installed on the desktop machine and the appropriate folders set as Shared. The Windows 7 netbook can see the desktop system’s icon in its network folder but when it’s clicked on, rather than opening to show the shared folders, it asks for a password.

The user account logged onto in the desktop system does not have a password set. The desktop machine was secondhand and bought from a school that was up upgrading its kit and I suspect that at some point it was part of a domain, although it use now it’s simply a singe, local machine. Obviously they’ve no idea what the password is and I’ve not come across password protection in a peer-to-peer setup (I’m fairly clueless about client/server setups).

Does anyone know what’s going on and whether there’s a way of removing the password protection without having to reinstall Windows (I’m quite happy editing the Registry if it’s possible that way)?

Some suggestions here

http://www.technize.com/solutionwindows-asks-for-password-on-shared-folders-on-the-network/

I shall explore that, thank you. However, I suspect that the password protection is for the computer as a whole rather than the shared folders, as the password is requested when they try to open the computer icon from the netbook’s network folder. I’d assume (although I don’t know) that if specific, or even all, folders where password protected the computer icon would open and show the shared folders themselves and ask for a password when an attempt was made to access a folder.

There may be something left over from it’s previous incarnation as a client on a domain network although it’s logged on to a local user account.

With xp all files have user access control. So you have to be a.verified user on the kachine for it to see if you have access. A network share is an extra level above this. On the share ensure that everyone and unknown users have at least read access. Then on the actual folder on the machine do the same,this should cascade down to the files.

also some routers don’t allow network traffic from the wireless to the wired network. Some googling should sort you out either way.

Cheers, it turns out that the machine didn’t come from a school after all (that was another one) so it may not have been on a domain. I’ll have a play with the suggestions when I can get to look at the machine and see what I can sort out. I’m sure that there’s a solution out there.