Password Protection

[Womble]

Does anyone know how you can password protect a folder?. I am using XPhome

Cheers

[blackthorn]

If you read this it tells you how to do it in XP.
http://www.pcworld.com/howto/article...,110663,00.asp

I think you can only to it if the folder is in the mydocuments folder. Then you right click the folder, select properties, then select the sharing tab and click the make this folder private check box.

Well i know you can do that on XP Pro. Not sure about home

[willie]

You can always get third party software to do this for you one such bit of software can be found here...
http://www.everstrike.com/download.htm

[Womble]

Thats the problem, The folder is shared by two pc's. But the second pc is primerily used by my kids. So I need to password protect the folder its self. I am sure I have seen software somewhere but for the life of me I can't remember where....all that abuse of my brain has taken its toll on my memory!

[Alanmelon]

If you have WinZip, you could make a password protected archive of the files in that folder.

[ntl customer]

Originally Posted by blackthorn

If you read this it tells you how to do it in XP.
http://www.pcworld.com/howto/article...,110663,00.asp

That is just the same as compressing the file using WinZip as you are creating a zip file - the "compressed folder" is just a zip file, not a folder (directory). I think that article is a bit misleading to be honest - you cannot create a password protected folder (directory) in Windows XP without the use of external software.

However you can assign using NTFS permissions (bit difficult in XP Home I think as BG has made it a lot more fiddly to do so - you need toi reboot into safe mode to view the security tab) to control user access to folders on the system.

So for example here, I have set to deny access to the guest. If you do that with your kid's account then when they try and access the folder they will get an access denied message and will not be able to view the contents or execute the files within them. As long as you add yourself to the list and set yourself to have full control then you will be able to view and modify files in that folder.



Assuming your kids have a bog standard user's account (not a Power User's or Administrator one) then they will not be able to tinker about with the permissions.

However, I have only used XP Professional and Windows 2000 Professional to do this on - XP Home is "dumbed down" and accessing these features is made difficult so I really can't offer any more advice other than the above.

Also is this folder shared on a network between the 2 computers? I know that there is an option to set a password on a folder if it is shared over the network but I'm not sure if it is available in Home - it certainly is in Pro.