How to Share Folders and Printers on Your Network

Sharing Folders

You can share any folder on your computer so people can access all files below it from other computers. That includes a folder on your hard drive, an entire hard drive partition, a CD-ROM, a DVD-ROM, a flash USB drive and even a floppy disk drive. Any device that is recognized as a drive by the operating system can be shared.
To share a folder or drive, just click on it with the right mouse button and select Sharing and Security from the menu that will appear. On our example we will be sharing your entire D: partition. As we mention, you could share only one folder of your hard drive.

Figure 4: Select Sharing and Security on the folder you want to share.

On the window that will appear, click on “If you understand the risk but still want to share the root of the drive, click here”.

Figure 5: Yes, that is what we want.

On the next window, you need to check “Share this folder on the network” and give a name for the sharing on “Share name” (we used “Shared_Data”). That’s how your shared folder will be known on your network. If you want to enable people from writing new files to your shared folder or updating files already there you should enable “Allow network users to change my files”.

Figure 6: Enabling folder sharing.

Just hit Ok and your folder will be accessible by all computers on your network (this procedure can delay a little bit).
Now that you shared your folder, we will show you how to access it from other computers.