Home Networking with Win7

[BobH]

Before the great motherboard frying of September 2012, I had contentedly run WinXP for years. I had defined a home network that was used for printer sharing and a modicum of file sharing. The primary purpose was to share printers.

Now I have Win 7 HP. Apparently my native intellect and hard-earned knowledge were all lost the moment I installed Win 7. When I tried to follow the instructions, I was never given the chance to choose the existing setup on the other XP-based desktop. Can one not share files and printers between XP and Win7 systems sharing the same router and ISP connection? The ISP connection sharing is not an issue, but I cannot get the Win 7 machine to create a new sharing arrangement nor to accept the old one.

[stuck]

You need to make sure your Win 7 machine is in the same WORKGROUP as the XP machine. However Win 7's native networking is based on something called 'homegroups'.

I have a Win 7 Starter Ed netbook that happily sees the Shared Docs folder on my XP desktop machine.

Have a read here:
http://windows.microsoft.com/is-IS/wind ... -workgroup

Ken

[StuartR]

I used to have a mixture of Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 - all sharing printers and file shares. I just set the Windows 7 computer up with the same Workgroup name, username and password as the other computers and it all worked.

[John Gray]

Interconnecting WinXP and Win7 machines does require a bit of faffing about, particular with sharing of, well, shares, and it is advisable to have the same usernames and passwords on all machines. Then "it just works"...

(I'm just doing this sort of thing on my domain at work.)

[John Gray]

Oh, I should have mentioned for the Windows 7 boxes: "LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy":

"Open Registry Editor and expand the key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System\
In the right-hand pane, double click on "LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy" key and type 1 in the Value Data box and click on OK.

NOTE: If "LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy" key doesn't exist (it didn't for me - JG), then right click on an empty area, select New and then select DWORD (32-bit) Value. Name it as "LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy" (without quotes). Set the value to 1, as above.

Close the Registry Editor and reboot the system."

Solves the following problems:
"When attempting to use Windows Explorer (or the Run command) you receive the following error message:

Logon unsuccessful:
Windows is unable to log you on.
Make sure that your user name and password are correct.

If you try to map a network drive to the administrative share by using the Net Use command, you get the following error message after providing the correct credentials:

System error 5
has occurred. Access is denied."