Windows 7: I cant seem to share my hard drive w/ other PCs

I'm going to use Windows 7 for my media center PC. Its going to be a machine without a monitor, I'll just stream from extenders and control it with logmein.com for now. I've currently got 3 XP machines, I like to be able to share the hard drives and map them on my other PCs to easily drop files onto them. But I've noticed since Vista, I just cant access those hard drives. I try to map it, and usually the PC shows up but nothing is there to select. At the most, my wife's Vista laptop has allowed me to access her Public folder but thats it. Its got the be one of the biggest annoyances with vista for me. We have no firewalls or virus software (i just hate it..id rather reformat than sacrifice PC performance), we use the windows built in firewall but thats it.

I'm really enjoying Windows 7 RC so far while testing media center on it. I want to use it for all my PCs but I get so annoyed when I go through the sharing process and the drive has the "hand" underneath it and I still cant access it from other PCs.

Any help is appreciated, and I'm I the only one who feels like MS decided we are too stupid to operate our computers as we want to after the XP days?

Totaly agree with you if I am to stupid to have the keys to set up my network and sharing as I want I need to have MS free home service to set it up for me following my needs
BTW I'm trying to share a Seven drive on a a network with XP machine
But young generation Seven seems to have communication problems with their XP parents

You have to right click on the drive and map it to her pc and make sure sharing is setup correctly for Windows 7. Make sure netbios and printer sharing are also enabled on you network adapters....here's another post on the same issue..

Share XP drive with Windows 7?

In order to access the entire drive on the Windows 7 PC you need to go into the Security tab of the drive itself and add "Everyone" to the permissions list.

To share the entire drive:
Open My Computer -> right click Local Disk D or which ever drive letter your drive is using -> select Properties -> select Security tab -> click Edit button -> click Add button -> enter the name of the User you want to set Security permissions (it is the same user name you've set the sharing permissions for, ex. Everyone will set the read permissions to every user. Put check marks in the boxes for full access and control -> click OK hit apply-> select the desired permissions -> click OK -> wait while permissions are set -> and your Done.

Quite the opposite. In fact, most cross OS sharing issues are due to the user not setting up the network or local accounts properly. If the drives are shared, the PCs are in the same workgroup, you use the same user account and passwords on each system, and file sharing is enabled, you'll have no problem connecting by UNC path, aka \\computername\sharename. People usually skip one of those steps.

Windows 7 introduced HomeGroups which make the networking much easier in term of a single home network.

Speaking of...if you only plan to connect to the HTPC from within your network, RDP works better than logmein.

"Quite the opposite. In fact, most cross OS sharing issues are due to the user not setting up the network or local accounts properly. If the drives are shared, the PCs are in the same workgroup, you use the same user account and passwords on each system, and file sharing is enabled, you'll have no problem connecting by UNC path, aka \\computername\sharename. People usually skip one of those steps."

Sorry to say that this is not my experience. I have a mixed home network: Windows 7 main system, XP laptop, Vista laptop, all in the same workgroup. As the "administrator" I shared disks, used the same account name (mine) on all systems, with admin privileges with no password, had file sharing enabled, and set "passwords not required".

The Win 7 pc was able to access shared folders and drives on XP and Vista systems (though only after considerable additional work on the Vista system), the Vista system could access the XP's shared folders and drives, but neither Vista nor XP could access shared folders and drives on the Win 7 system. (XP couldn't access Vista either).

..until I read chev65's post earlier - which fixed the problem -- though the system went through a process of "setting security information" (unknown) on files in my Win 7 C: drive !?

But anyway, a million thanks go to chev65 !

My issue with all this is basic: we non-professional users should not have to struggle with complex, fragmented, convoluted, and ultimately, "undocumented" procedures to set up our simple home networks. Microsoft's help information does not actually help lead us through all the unknown paths, nooks and crannies of different layers of security.

Whatever happened to "plug-n-play"?
I can't believe that the geniuses at Microsoft couldn't give us a simple-to-use software tool to simply configure a new PC into an existing network.
.. or did they, but I missed it?

Pity.