Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

  • Congratulations Chriss Miller on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

Is it possible to allow all users t

Status
Not open for further replies.

ceh4702

Programmer
Jul 25, 2001
2,065
US
Is it possible to allow all users to use the same My Documents area and desktop settings? If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.
 
So should I use one account for administrator and then one for the users? Also what effect does it have to have a password for the Admin account. I saw somewhere where it recommended having the administrator account passworded. If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.
 
I should mention that my computer is in a 3 computer network and we are using a Linksys Router to share cable modem access. If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.
 
Personally, for this scenario, I would have 1 account with administrative priveleges password protected, and 1 normal user account in addition to the built-in Administrator account (password protected).

The problem with having all users log onto 1 account is that someone is going to change the desktop, and someone else won't like it or someone is going to delete somebody else's files - accidentally, of course.
 
All users paths are in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\DocFolderPaths

There is another path in :
HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders

there you see %userprofile%
that will be used for every new user

All personal usersettings are under
HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-xxx\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders

As you can see, that can get very very complicated!

My advice, if you want different users, share the My Documents of all users. Everyone can access them ,but they will be seperate. You can set to share, read-only if you wish. The solution is out there. [morning]
 
I have wanted to do something similar but actually allow others users on other computers to access a set of folders that would be avalaible to everyone, local users as well as over the network. The problem that I encountered was when I put these sub-folders in "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents" certain programs (notably Kazaa was unable to see them and/or read/write to/from them). I tried to change the folder options for the shared documents folder with no success. I even tried to create copies of the sub-folder for "pictures" in the shared documents - all that did was point to the original "Shared Pictures" folder. I eventually put them in a folder called the "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Public Documents" and had to put shortcuts to them in the shared documents folder. This works for those programs that were unable to see it in the "Shared Documents" folder before, but is now inconvenient for me since I have to open the shortcuts and cannot scrol through the listing from the toolbar that I have for "My Documents" on the taskbar (I suffer so everyone else benefits, just my luck). Does anybody have any ideas. Thanks in advance.
 
Try mapping a drive letter to the shared folder. Right click on my computer, map network drive, check the 'recconect at logon' if you want it to remain active in the future. Then, just access that drive letter from within your programs.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top