Classic Sharing in XP Professional

As you have seen, SFS is a convenient method for granting access to your system's file resources. However, it does not give you nearly the level of administrative flexibility available with classic sharing. In fact, let me be very plain: if you have an XP Professional installation, turn SFS off. If you want to use classic sharing, you'll have to turn off SFS anyway because SFS is the default. To do so, take the following actions:

1.	Open Windows Explorer and choose Tools | Folder Options to open the Folder Options dialog box.
2.	Choose the View tab, and then scroll to the last Advanced setting. Uncheck the box called "Use simple file sharing (recommended)."

Now you're ready to share out a folder the old-fashioned way. To make a folder and all of its contents available via classic sharing:

1.	Open Windows Explorer, right-click on the folder you want to make available, and choose Sharing and Security.
2.	From the Sharing tab (there's a separate Security tab now), select the radio button called "Share this folder," and then give the share a name. Again, the share name and folder name do not have to match.
3.	Click Apply and OK to perform the sharing operation.

Figure 11-5. Sharing with classic sharing.

One more thing: if your XP Professional computer is joined to a Windows Server domain, it will always use classic sharing, no matter what your settings are in Folder Options. XP Home systems cannot join a domain.

Using this model, you are also able to set limits on the number of simultaneous connections with the "User limit" settings. The maximum number of users allowed at one time is 10 on a Windows Professional system. For Home systems, the maximum allowed is five. Of course, the more connections allowed, the greater the chance that computer performance will suffer.