Archive for January, 2005

You can choose to have software errors reported to Microsoft

Tuesday, January 11th, 2005

Tired of saying no when Windows asks to report crashes back to Microsoft?

Disable the feature under My Computer / Properties / System Properties / Advanced / Error Reporting.

Sharing and security model for local accounts

Sunday, January 2nd, 2005

Be our guest!

I was using the great psservice tool from Sysinternals to execute some test scripts. It was getting ‘access denied’ when connecting to a local box running Windows XP. This behavior was unexpected because both boxes are in the same workgroup and the user accounts have matching names & passwords.

A little sleuthing turned up the problem. Apparently XP ships with heightened security so by default users are logged in over the network as guests.

It’s easy to switch. To change the default so that users get their own credentials when accessing XP over the network, switch the settings to what Microsoft calls Classic.

Start “Help and Support” on your system and search for “Network access: Sharing and security model for local accounts” to see how to make the change in Local Security Policies.