Enabling File and Printer Sharing In Windows 7

File and Printer Sharing disabled by default in Windows 7, and unfortunately Microsoft has yet again changed the method to turn it back on. The steps you need to take are now different than the ones you took in Vista. So how do you get it back up and running in Windows 7?

1. Open the control panel.
2. Click on “Network and Internet”
3. Click on “Network and Sharing Center”
4. A new window will be displayed. Look on the left pane.
5. Click on “Change Advanced Sharing Settings”
6. Now you are shown different profiles.
   The list can change depending on how your system is configured. Windows 7 will determine automatically what profile your network card is using. You may want to enable file and printer sharing on all of them, or limit it to the “Home or Work” profile for higher security.
7. Expand the profile you want to modify, and scroll down until you see “File and Printer Sharing”
8. Click on “Turn on file and printer sharing”
9. Save your changes.

Enabling the $admin share

After completing the above steps, you also need to make a registry change.
Open regedit, and drill down to this key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

Under this key you will need to create a new DWORD value called:

LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy

Set it to 1, and reboot.
Now you can access the $admin share on your Windows 7 machine