Ask The Admin

Davey writes to us that he needs to get access to his home Vista machine over the wireless network and it would make his life easy if he can do it - like he does it in XP or 2000.

Dave connects using a browser or command line to file://machine/drive$. As we have covered before the $ makes the share hidden. (oh!) So that's why it doesn't show up if you just type file://machinename/ at the command prompt.

So we did some digging for you Davey boy and you can definitely do it. Its a registry tweak and just don't forget that foxing with the registry is dangerous make a full backup first and don't blame us if you don't!!

Ever since Windows 2000, Windows has always created a few shares administrative purposes. The most often used being, \\machinename\c$ , because it's an easy way to get access to an entire drive, if you have permissions to be there.

As a default, only Administrators have access to it - the fact that there's a trailing $ means that it won't show up in the Network browser. Hidden access. Sweet!

Vista has it built in as well, but for some reason my domain machines allowed access to this share -while my home /workgroup machine didn't.

I would get the log in prompt.

I'd log in.

It'd come back screaming "invalid account" and I'd look at the screen and shrugged my shoulders'. Some googling on the interwebs gave me a registry tweak to get around it...

Head our warnings and... open the registry and go to:HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

Create a new DWORD called LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy

Set the DWORD value to 1

Some people have said to reboot. It still prompts for a user ID, and you still have to have File Sharing turned on via the Firewall and permissions set for this user for the drive, but that's a given.

Basically, if you make this registry mod and you still can't connect, create a new share and see if you can get to that - my guess is that you'll find that some global network setting was turned off so not only would this fail but all network calls would fail.

And as per usual: this is a change to the registry and that's scary stuff. Use it at your own risk and for your own system. Make backups often in the event that you accidental twitch and delete the majority of your registry: it won't be my fault. I'll empathy and probably sympathize, but I don't know that I can help you recover.


Are you alright now Dave? - Let us know!