Public sharing folder help

Evening all,

Just looking for some advice regarding the public folder in windows. I have windows 7 on my desktop which is wired to my router and my laptop running vista wireless and on both machines i deleted the public folders in the users folder as i never had any intention of sharing anything. I did this a while ago now so there is no way of restoring it via a system restore. My main question is im looking to share some music files between my laptop and desktop with the files being on the desktop machine, could i create just another basic folder and share it that way? if so how would i go about doing it?

Im kinda new to the whole sharing thing so any help would be much appreciated

many thanks

I assume you already have your computers in the same Homegroup. If so, you should be able to right click the folder you want to share, go to "Share with" in the context menu, and should be able to select either Read or Read/Write.

Hi mate thanks for the reply, i have not set any homegroup up yet would i have to set that up thru windows 7?

Both computers will need to be in the same group. Right click My Computer > Properties. You should see something titled "Computer name, domain, and workgroup settings" above your Windows product ID. Clicking "Change Settings" under the "Computer name, domain, and workgroup settings" space should allow you to change your PCs name and the Workgroup it's in. Do the same for your Vista. If it asks to reboot, do it.

I share my files the same way as you would (Windows 7 desktop, Vista laptop), and that is all I had to do :) Hope it helps/works for you.

Thanks so much mate i'll give it a go and see how i get on, one last thing tho is there a way to password protect the folders i want to share just incase someone some how got onto my network and was able to access the folders?

thanks so much

I'm not aware of any particular way to password protect folders on Windows 7..maybe somebody else does? As far as I know, network shared folders simply use user authentication for access. How I understand it is..the username and password you are required to enter to log on to the remote PC is the folder's protection.

A quick Google search for 'password protect folders in windows 7' brought up these 2 links, which seem to aim at using a Guest account.

Password Protecting Folders in Windows 7
How to Password Protect a Network Share

Hopefully they help, and you get it working how you like.

Thanks so much guys, i have managed to share my files i wanted to now between my desktop and laptop. I created the shares on my desktop machine and when i access the shared files via my laptop i dont get asked for a password i guess this is because i have a user account on both machines with the same username & password. Its the standard admin account. Anyway i thought id try and access the shares via my partners laptop who was not in the same workgroup and also does not have an account on either of my machines and i was prompted for a password to access the shares i created. Entering my password then allowed access so i think im sorted, i did think that you had to have an account on the machine with the share to access it rather than just being able to enter the password for the account on that machine to access the files.

Thanks so much for all your help im so grateful, there was one more quick thing tho that always seems to confuse me. My laptop is named "liam-laptop" and when ever i want to share a file there is always 2 names in the group,
Administrators (liam-laptop\administrators) & Liam (liam-laptop\liam)

I just wondered why they both appear even tho i only have the 1 account which is the standard admin account? im sure im being rather dense here but just a little confused by it

Thanks so much again everyone