Win XP Home Networking: Two Steps Back

The number-one reason people set up home networks is to share an Internet connection, a capability supported by both the Professional and Home editions of Microsoft Windows XP. File sharing is another driving force, but one that can introduce complications. Although you want the convenience of being able to access your files from whichever PC is handy, you may also have some qualms about your kids playing around with your stock portfolio. What you need is a way to share files with some household users but not others. The Windows 9x platforms accommodate this need by letting you configure sharing with specific passwords. And you can set access privileges for specific users and groups in the Windows NT family of operating systems—with one unfortunate exception: Windows XP Home Edition.

Windows XP Home Edition uses a feature Microsoft calls Simplified Sharing (also called Simple File Sharing) for sharing folders. When you view the Sharing tab of a folder's Properties dialog, as seen in Figure 1, the available options are quite different from those presented by previous consumer versions of Windows. Although you can prevent users from changing files in a shared folder (including yourself, if you're working from a remote computer), the logical, useful permission options available in other Windows versions are missing.

Windows XP Home Edition's lack of support for passwords on shared folders creates an all-or-nothing paradigm that fails to meet the needs of most home network users. If you share a folder on the network, you cannot prevent specific users from gaining access to that folder. Password-protecting individual files is the workaround for securing shared folders. All Microsoft Office applications and many other Windows programs let you secure individual files with a password.

Simplified Sharing does let you lock folders that are part of your private profile (like My Documents) by selecting the option Make This Folder Private. But although this feature keeps other people who use your computer out, it requires NTFS—an important caveat that appears in only one of the operating system's help files. And if you install NTFS and mark your own folders as private, you cannot access them from a remote computer.

On a computer running Windows XP Home Edition and NTFS, you can set individual permissions similar to those available in Windows XP Pro or Windows 2000. The problem is, the Properties dialog for drives and folders on an NTFS system does not have a Security tab. The only way to set permissions is to log on as administrator, which you can do only from Safe Mode. (To boot into Safe Mode, press F8 after the graphical boot screen appears and select Safe Mode with Networking from the menu.) After logging on as administrator, open the Sharing tab of a shared folder's Properties dialog and click Permissions. As shown in Figure 2, you can set Full Control, Change, or Read permissions for the users and groups in your network. To set granular permissions for additional users, choose Add | Advanced | Find Now, and you'll see a display of user names (local users only). Select a name and click OK, then set the permissions.

You may run across articles that say you can follow this procedure even on a FAT32 system. And in fact, Windows XP will blithely let you work through the same steps and dialogs we've just discussed—but your settings won't take. You can't set granular permissions on a FAT32 system, but you'll see no error messages telling you so, and the help files offer little clear information.