Windows 7 Trick

Most of you won't care about this one bit, and I have little that's good to blog about these days, but after updating to Windows 7 there's one nagging issue that I just finally figured out and need to document somewhere.

I like to share files between all my machines at home. I backup data on one machine to another, and I keep all my downloaded files centrally. When we upgraded to Win 7, my mapped drives to administrative shares (C$, D$) broke. I searched high and low to find out why, and it appears to have something to do with Homegroup usage and increased security, blah blah blah.

Finally, I found a registry update to fix the whole thing:

How to access Administrative shares in Windows 7.

I rarely use network shares on my computers. Ok, I have a few setup for the family to use if they need to copy something from one computer to another and a share for our network storage. Other than that I have always favored using admintrative shares. These don’t show up in network neighborhood, but can be accessed by using \\computername\C$. The “$” at the end of a share name makes it invisible to network browsing, but otherwise it is a regular share. As the name implies, administrative shares are only available to those in the Local Administrators security group. This is turned off by default in Vista. Bummer, it’s so handy… I guess that’s part of the big security push. *shrug*

To enable administrative shares you gotta make a registry change. Click on the orb and in the search box type ‘regedit’ and hit enter. Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System. Add a new DWORDÂ called “LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy” and give it a value of 1. Reboot and yer done!

There, documented.