How to Turn Public Folder Sharing on or Off

By Timothy Tibbetts

Public Folder sharing is turned off by default, but perhaps you now need to share folders on your network, or you shared folders in the past and forgot how to turn it back off. Either way, we have you covered.

Click on Start > Settings > Network & Internet > Network and Sharing Center.

Look on the left for Change advanced sharing options and click on that.

Look for All networks at the bottom and expand the arrow to the right.

Now you can see the Public sharing options:

Turn on sharing so anyone with network access can read and write files in the Public folders

Turn off Public folder sharing (people logged on to this computer can still access these folders)

Choose one, then close and Windows you opened.