Getting XP and 7 To Share Files/Folders With Each Other

For those of you with a newly installed Windows 7 that have shared folders you want your XP/2000 machines to connect to, you’ve quickly realized it doesn’t work.

It does work – but you have to modify a setting in Windows 7 to enable it.

Before I tell you what setting to change, the reason why you can’t get an XP/2000 box to connect to a Win 7 shared folder over the network is because the security has been upgraded from 40/56-bit to 128-bit. Win 7 by default has 128-bit network connections enabled, so you will have to "degrade" it to 40/56-bit.

Here’s how:

Click the windows logo, search for sharing, then click Manage Advanced Sharing Settings, like this:

(Yours may look slightly different but it will be there.)

Expand the Home or Work profile, then scroll down to File sharing connections and select Enable file sharing for devices that use 40 or 56-bit encryption, like this:

Save the changes and it’s a done deal.

On attempt of your XP/2000 machines to connect to your Windows 7 box, it will prompt for your Windows 7 user account. Enter your username and password, and the sharing will work just like it did before with XP-to-XP, XP-to-2000 and vice versa.

If you don’t want to be prompted for the Windows 7 user account credentials, there’s a setting right below called Password Protected Sharing. If you disable this, when you connect to the share it will not prompt for Windows 7 user account credentials. However I don’t recommend disabling this.