How to share any folder without password in Windows 8/10 in a home network if a Microsoft account is involved?
I managed to share folders without passwords in Windows 10 with Microsoft Accounts by following this guide: http://www.howtogeek.com/126214/how-to-create-network-file-shares-with-no-passwords-in-windows-8/
I publish here in order to prevent link rot:
- Open Network and Sharing Center
- Then click on the Change advanced sharing settings Link in the left hand panel.
- Now expand the All Networks section.
- Finally switch the radial button to the Turn off password protected sharing setting and click Save changes.
- It works!
I did not try this extensively (for example if you need to have a password protected share instead), as all the shares in my LAN don't need to be password protected, and since there's no wifi, I know that i'm the only one to access the share. But I think, if it disable all the passwords, it will still work with NTFS access permissions
To explain the problem :
On Window 8.1, and presumably Windows 8, when using a Microsoft account to login to Windows, the default user-name when you make a network connection is MicrosoftAccount\<live_id_username>, instead of the login <computer_name>\<username> as in previous versions of Windows.
This MicrosoftAccount form is likely to cause a login failure on any server that is not using a Microsoft account, due to the strict way that Microsoft/Local accounts are implemented in Windows 8/8.1.
I have not been able to find a way of forcing Windows 8/8.1 to use the old format of computer-name\user-name, unless with one of the workarounds you have listed in your post.
Probably this problem needs to be addressed by Microsoft itself.
I have tested and this is still true in Windows 10, so don't expect any improvement. Unfortunately, this is just the way that Microsoft/Local accounts were implemented.