Windows Vista: The Complete Reference (Complete Reference Series)

User Accounts and LAN Security

Chapter 6 describes how you can set up user accounts on a computer to allow several people to be able to use the computer, storing separate settings for each person. The section "Keeping Your Files Private" describes how to set up public and private folders for each user. User accounts are also useful on a peer-to-peer LAN, even if each computer is normally used by only one person. Windows Vista Home Basic Edition doesn't support the security provided by Microsoft's domain-based LANs. However, you have the following security options:

• Read-only drives and folder files When you share a drive or folder on the LAN, you can designate it to be read-only, so that people on other computers can't change your files. For example, on a home LAN you might have a folder that contains your family's photos. You might want to share the folder with family members on other computers but set it as read-only so that other people can't accidentally delete pictures (or deliberately delete pictures in which their hair looks funny ).

• Nonshared drives You can set some drives not to be accessible over the LAN. We recommend that you separate your programs and documents into two separate partitions, and share only the documents partition. (Few programs run off of partitions on other computers, so there's no point sharing your Windows and program partition.)

• Private folders You can use Windows Vista's user accounts to create private folders (see "Keeping Your Files Private" in Chapter 6).