Password protecting shared folders in Windows XP

[cwathen]

OK, this is the scenario: I'm looking at moving to using my laptop computer to do most things, but leaving my desktop running as a kind of server so that I can use it's hard disks, connect peripherals to it and then access those resources over the wireless network which we have in the house.

However, I want to be able to control acccess to my desktop's resources so that only I can access them, I don't want everyone on the network to be able to see what's on my hard drive.

With Windows 98/2000 this was simple - you could password-protect any shared resources to limit access to them, so with that I could simply share the root of each partition and slap a password on it. Am I completely blind, or does Windows XP not have this capability? All I can see is an option to prevent write access to shares, I can't see any way of password protecting them.

Alternatively, does anyone know of any third party software which can do this? I don't need to encrypt the data, all I want to do is require a password for the share to be accessed (and ideally, before anyone can print to my printer too).

[Dr Lobster*]

you can achieve the same thing by granting only a specific user permissions to the share and setting a password on that user.

when you try to access the share you will be prompted to provide the username/password details for that user. If you've got Windows XP Home, you'll need to do this in safe mode.


if you give that user the same username/password details as the account you use to login to your laptop, you will be connected automatically, whilst other users will be prompted to enter their details.