Turn Off Administrative Shares
In a world where we must concern ourselves with spyware, phishing emails,
and clowns trying to break in to our wireless networks, it??™s almost reassuring
when Windows itself is the security threat. Well, not so much reassuring as
infuriating.
It turns out that every copy of Vista has a backdoor that could permit someone
else to read any file on your PC, and that vulnerability exists on Windows
2000 and XP PCs, too.
Map a Network Drive
In most cases, you??™ll want to access remote folders through the Network
folder, as described in ???Access a Shared Folder Remotely,??? earlier in this
chapter. However, there??™s another system in place in Windows Vista,
included mostly as a holdover from years past.
In Windows Explorer, navigate to the Network folder. Open a remote PC,
right-click a shared folder, and select Map Network Drive. In the window
that appears, select a free drive letter from the list, turn on the Reconnect at
logon option (if you think you??™ll use this again), and click Finish when you??™re
done.
A new drive will appear in the Computer branch of the folder tree in Windows
Explorer, and you can use it to get to the files contained therein.
There are a few reasons why you might want to do this. First, the feature is
there to provide compatibility with old??”and I mean old??”applications that
don??™t understand UNC paths (e.g., \\Xander\Desktop). Of course, you may
encounter a new program that doesn??™t work reliably with UNC paths, and
this is a perfectly cromulent workaround.
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