Windows 7 home premium and connecting to Macs over network

I recently got a laptop running Windows 7 Home premium and wanted to do as bit of file copying between my mac mini and win7 over local network.

Only to find that Windows 7 out of the box doesnt see macs (even when Samba sharing is turned on in mac network prefs).

Alittle digging brought up a solution which is shown below, but wait it doesnt work on home premium…

Goto Start Menu
Search for: Local
Hit Enter
Select Local Security Policy
Goto Local Policies> Security Options
Double Click on Network security: LAN Manager Authentication
Change level to: Send LM # LTLM Responses
Then,
Goto Network security: Minimum session security for NTLM SSP
De-select Require 128-bit encryption
Hit OK

The ‘Local Security policy’ helper is NOT included in Win 7 Home premium (its only in pro or ultimate) – Great one Microsoft – another way to force people to upgrade and shell out another $130 bucks!

Oh, but wait, you can still fix the network WITHOUT upgrading:

Basically, you have to add a REG_DWORD value called ‘LmCompatibilityLevel’ to HKLM|System|CurrentControlSet|Control|Lsa and set the value to 2.

Do this by:

Click on Start
Search for ‘regedit’ (registry editor)
Double click regedit
Navigate to HKLM (Home Local Machine)|System|CurrentControlSet|Control|Lsa
Right click on a blank area and choose ‘New’ then ‘DWORD’
Enter name of ‘LmCompatibilityLevel’ with a value of ’2′.
Now quit rededit and then click start and type: “advanced sharing settings” in run
Click on the ‘Manage Advanced sharing settings’
Click on ‘home or work’
Change the ‘file sharing connections’ option to ‘enable file sharing for devices that use 40- or 56-bit encryption’.
Restart windows.

More information about the ‘LmCompatibilityLevel’:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/l…/cc960646.aspx

That just saved me a wad of cash! Sorry Microsoft!