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You, as a savvy Windows Vista user, know how to create a strong password, and you can certainly pass along that information to the other people in your home or …

How do you know who's logged on to a Vista machine? For example, what if you're sitting down at a client computer and you're not sure who's logged on and what privileges they have?

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I mentioned in my previous post that you can add $ to a share name to hide the share, and that it was a good idea to also modify the share name to something not easily guessable by some snoop. Note, however, that Windows Vista sets up certain hidden shares for administrative purposes, including one for drive C: (C$) and any other hard disk partitions you have on your system. Windows Vista also sets up the following hidden shares: ShareShared PathPurpose ADMIN$%SystemRoot%Remote administration IPC$N/ARemote interprocess communication print$%SystemRoot%\System32\spool\driversAccess to printer drivers To see these shares, select Start, All Programs, Accessories, Command Prompt to open a command prompt session, type net share, and press Enter. You see a listing similar to this: Share name Resource Remark ----------------------------------------------------------- C$ C:\ Default share D$ D:\ Default share ADMIN$ C:\WINDOWS Remote Admin IPC$ Remote IPC print$ C:\System32\spool\drivers Printer Drivers Public C:\Users\Public So although the C$, D$, and ADMIN$ shares are otherwise hidden, they're well known, and they represent a small security risk should an intruder get access to your network. To close this hole, you can force Windows Vista to disable these shares. Here are the steps to follow: Click Start, type regedit in the Search box, and then click regedit.exe in the search results. The User Account Control dialog box appears. Enter your UAC credentials to continue. Windows Vista opens the Registry …

Setting up user accounts with strong passwords and then applying shared-folder permissions on those accounts are the necessary network security tasks, and in most small networks they're also sufficient for achieving a decent level of security. However, when it comes to securing your network, a healthy dose of paranoia is another good "tool" to have at hand. For example, the properly paranoid network administrator doesn't assume that no one will ever infiltrate the network, just the opposite: The admin assumes that someday someone will get access, and then he or she wonders what can be done in that case to minimize the damage.

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Most Windows Vista computers are configured to go into Sleep mode after a certain amount of idle time. Sleep mode is the new low-power state that Vista uses to replace the confusing Standby and Hibernate modes from earlier versions of Windows. (Standby mode preserved your work and enabled you to restart quickly, but didn't entirely shut off the machine's power; Hibernate mode preserved your work and completely shut off the machine, but also took a relatively long time to restart-faster than shutting down your computer entirely, but slower than Standby.)

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