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:

  1. Open Network and Sharing Center
  2. Then click on the Change advanced sharing settings Link in the left hand panel. screenshot
  3. Now expand the All Networks section. screenshot
  4. Finally switch the radial button to the Turn off password protected sharing setting and click Save changes. screenshot
  5. 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.