Configure Passwords and File Sharing
Windows 7 supports password-protected and passwordless file sharing. Before I explain this, I need to give you some background. In the original Windows NT workgroup network security model, when you attempted to use a network resource shared by another computer, Windows would see if your username and password matched an account on that remote computer. One of four things would happen:
• If the username and password exactly matched an account defined on the remote computer, you got that user's privileges on the remote machine for reading and writing files.
• If the username matched but the password didn't, you were prompted to enter the correct password.
• If the username didn't match any predefined account, or if you failed to supply the correct password, you got the privileges accorded to the Guest account, if the Guest account was enabled.
• If the Guest account was disabled—and it usually was—you were denied access.
The problem with this system is that it required you to create user accounts on each computer you wanted to reach over the network. Multiply, say, 5 users times 5 computers, and you had 25 user accounts to configure. What a pain! (People pay big bucks for a Windows Server-based domain network to eliminate this very hassle.) Because it was so much trouble, people usually enabled the Guest account.
Windows 7 has a new feature called the HomeGroup that provides a way around the headaches of managing lots of user accounts and passwords. When you make a Windows 7 computer a member of a homegroup, it uses a built-in user account named HomeGroupUser$ when it accesses shared resources on other computers in the group. The member computers all have this same account name set up, with the same password (which is derived from the homegroup's password in some way), so that all member computers can use any shared resource. When you share a library, folder,
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