I, for myself, an early Vista adopter (since Release Candidate 2, if I remember well), as I’m always liked new things and as Windows XP was on the market for a long time I’ve wanted something else. But even now, after two years of using Vista I’m still confused sometimes when faced with simple tasks, like File Sharing without a password, which I needed a few days ago and just yesterday I’ve managed to do it right.

So, let’s see what I wanted to do and what stopped me: I have a desktop and a laptop and I was trying to share some files in order to copy them from one PC to another. I’ve browsed to the folder I was going to share, right clicked on it, selected Share and added Everyone as a Reader to the permissions list. Nice and easy, but when I tried to access that computer I was prompted for an user and password, which I didn’t set up anywhere else so end of the road for me.

Yesterday I’ve had a breaktrough, and let’s see what I did in a few easy to follow steps.

Step 1. Left click on the network icon in System Tray (highlighted with red) and you get the picture below.

Step 2. Select Network and Sharing Center, that opens the picture below.

Step 3. Select Passwork protected sharing (underlinded with red in the picture above) and turn it off. That’s all. 

What it does it allows users to connect to your folders without requesting for an username and password. If it’s turned on, in order to view/modify files in shared folders you have to know an username and password that has rights on the computer that shares the files. Usernames with blank passwords don’t work, as the system requires a password.

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