When file sharing and network discovery is on what is visable to the other users using the same network?

Turning on Network discovery simply means that when you turn on your computer it will automatically look for any shares and shared printers that are on the network or within the subnet mask range and give your computer access to them. You would still need to install the drivers for any printers that are discovered to use them. The "Shared Documents" folder allows all user profiles on that computer to be viewed no matter what profile is being used at the time. This will also show up as a network share. Small or home networks, such as yours, do not need network discovery turned on. Any shares and printers are easily managed on each computer without using network discovery. Turning on network discovery on your computer does not give anyone access to your files or shares since it is your computer that will be looking for shares and printers. Turning on file and printer sharing is another case entirely. This does allow others on the network to see your shares and shared printers. Unless he has some "skills", this is all others will be able to see and access. Since you are concerned about what others can see on your computer you can take different security measures to assure they cannot access anything that you do not want them to have access to. You can set the permissions on the folders that you want to protect and you can also set password on documents and spreadsheets. Depending on which versions of Windows you are using determines which persnissions can be set. Any partiton that is formatted in FAT32 cannot have the NTFS permissions set, regardless of the version of Windows you are using. To use the NTFS permissions you must be using a NTFS file format on that partition. Don't worry, FAT and FAT32 file systems are rarely used on todays computers simple because of the partition size limitations (32 Gig.) of FAT23. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/184006 Shares are not a bad thing. Just make sure you have the sensitive data locked down to where others do not have access to this data.