Windows 8 In Depth

Configure Passwords and File Sharing

Windows 8 supports password-protected and passwordless file sharing. Before we explain this, we need to give you some background. In the original Windows NT workgroup network security model, when you attempted to use a network resource shared by another computer, Windows would see if your username and password matched an account on that remote computer. One of four things would happen:

• If the username and password exactly matched an account defined on the remote computer, you got that user’s privileges on the remote machine for reading and writing files.

• If the username matched but the password didn’t, you were prompted to enter the correct password.

• If the username didn’t match any predefined account, ...