file sharing passwords

I set up a network of three pc's with winxp (both NTFS & Fat32) with several aconts. How do i set up passwords to folders so i can control user acess better!

 

XP-Home or XP-Pro?

And there simply aren't as many security options with FAT32 as with NTFS.

 

the OS is Windows XP PRO

i know that with ntfs the security is better, in this case not all the drives r in ntfs, but drives containing OS r all in ntfs... if necessary i can also convert the ones that r in fat32 to ntfs.

 

NTFS for sure offers more security options. Not so much a case of
"better than Fat32" (although it is) but more a matter of "very different thatn Fat32 ".

And unless you multi-boot and need a non-NT OS on the PC to work with the XP files, I don't see any downside to converting everything to NTFS. Any network connections will still work because the other PCs aren't dealing with the file system directly at all.

Rather than mess with passwords, make sure you have set up the user accounts you need. Then you can give any user the exact amount of file/folder access you want it to have. All the way from "full control" to no access whatever.

One possible setup for this would be to make 4 groups. Easier to do this and assign permissions to a group since later on you can add or remove a user account from a group and you will have dealt with all it's permissions for the entire PC.

You could have "admin ", "user" "sorta-user" and "no-way" groups and give admin full access to everything, user permission to read/modify files and run .exe apps, sortauser permission to do whatever but only in it's own section and elsewhere only the ability to run programs, and noway to be denied any access to anything.

Just bear in mind that NT will give the user it's most restrictive set of permissions so an account that was in admin and in user would only have user rights in a folder that contained both groups in the security section.

 

thanks for the help Newt, i'll try that...