Windows 7: Sharing with specific people

With Windows XP and Vista I was always able to connect my computers together and share the folders without difficulty. When I installed Windows 7 on my desktop with Vista on my laptop I had no trouble with file sharing. Today I installed Windows 7 on my laptop and now I have trouble with file sharing. If I share a folder with the homegroup no problem (I have homegroup sharing enabled), but the folder is wide open so that anyone on the homegroup can see the folder.

My problem is that if I want just my laptop and desktop to see each other they can't. Both the laptop and the desktop computers have the same user name and password, in the same workgroup and the folder on the desktop is set to share with a specific user name (me). When I try to access the folder from the laptop, I get a window saying that I don't have permission to access the folder. If I set the folder to share with the homegroup the laptop gets access.



I'm stymied, any idea's what the problem is?

Network discovery on for A an B, A and B can see each other in Homegroup. Not sure why u have issue with laptop and not desktop.

Perhaps I am just too old school, but I really think that homegroups has a problem. After removing both computers from the homegroup and and setting up the security and security the way I know it's supposed to be, the problem is resolved. In other words, if you want to share something with the entire homegroup, no problem using it. If you want to share a folder with a single user it doesn't work.

Someone in a post earlier said that homegroups is flaky, I now concur. It needs some more work and maturity. Until then, I'll network the old fashioned way.

I think you might be mistaken Windows 7 Homegroup with non Windows 7 Homegroups/Workgroups. They are both different things. For sharing of files to work within the Windows 7 Homegroups, all machines needs to be Windows 7. Are saying you cannot share files between 2 Windows 7 machines when using Windows 7 Homegroup?

Not at all. All of my machines now have Windows 7 professional x64 on them. I have my desktop machine, my laptop and my wife's desktop all networked. I set all computers up to use homegroups because the ability to share media easily is a great extension of the library concept. The thing is my wife doesn't need to know what is on my laptop or on my desktop necessarily, but if I try to share a folder for me to transfer files between my laptop and my desktop it seems that I can't without sharing the folder with the entire homegroup, in other words, I can't get the desktop and the laptop to share with a single user. Going out on a limb, it's like the laptop user isn't being given access as the desktop user or \\acomputer\user not = \\bcomputer\user when both have the same credentials in the same workgroup.

Once I removed the laptop and desktop from the homegroup, set the security of the folder to just my user name and set the sharing permissions to my user name (as I would normally do), now I can share the folder between the laptop and desktop and my wife doesn't see it

So while the concept is good, homegroups needs more work cause it's broken.