XP Home sharing restrictions

[John Franklin]

In XP, remote access to folders such as Program Files is by default
prohibited, even to Administrators. With XP Professional, the local security
policy can be altered to remove this restriction. But how is this done with
XP Home?

secpol.msc isn't present on Home machines, and if copied across doesn't
work.

Thanks for any help.

John Franklin

 

[Malke]

In XP, remote access to folders such as Program Files is by default
prohibited, even to Administrators. With XP Professional, the local
security policy can be altered to remove this restriction. But how is
this done with XP Home?

secpol.msc isn't present on Home machines, and if copied across
doesn't work.

Thanks for any help.

John Franklin

See if MVP Doug Knox's Security Console will do what you want. Get it at
http://www.dougknox.com under Windows XP Utilities.

Malke

 

[John Franklin]

No, that utility doesn't seem to have anything on sharing restrictions. Any
other thoughts?

Regards,

John Franklin

 

[Malke]

No, that utility doesn't seem to have anything on sharing
restrictions. Any other thoughts?

Upgrade to XP Pro if you need those kind of fine-grained permissions.
Otherwise use the Shared Documents folder instead of My Documents for
things you want to share.

Malke

 

[John Franklin]

It isn't a case of what I want to share, I want to be able to access the
Program Files and other directories remotely for maintenance, etc. Upgrading
to XP Pro on these machines isn't a possibility. I'd be quite happy to
remove all the security restrictions on the Home machines if that were
necessary. These problems didn't exist with Win2000 or previous versions -
who would know how to circumvent these new "features"?

Regards,

John

 

[Malke]

It isn't a case of what I want to share, I want to be able to access
the Program Files and other directories remotely for maintenance, etc.
Upgrading
to XP Pro on these machines isn't a possibility. I'd be quite happy
to remove all the security restrictions on the Home machines if that
were necessary. These problems didn't exist with Win2000 or previous
versions - who would know how to circumvent these new "features"?

You can't circumvent the limitations of Home Edition. You, or your
company, chose the wrong operating system for your purposes. I'm sorry,
but there really is no other way to say it. Your company probably
thought saving the money by buying Home instead of Pro was a good idea
without thoroughly thinking it through.

Like NT, Windows 2000 was never marketed as a consumer operating system.
Therefore it came ready for corporate use out of the box. XP Home *is*
marketed as a consumer operating system, aimed at the home user, with
XP Pro aimed at the business market. The differences between the two
versions are very clearly described here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/home/howtobuy/choosing2.mspx

I'm sorry that this information is not what you wanted to hear. If you
can't upgrade those machines to Pro, then consider doing a clean
install of Win2k instead (assuming you have some copies of the older
operating system available).

Malke