How to Hide Windows XP Machine From Network

In Windows 7, when you connect to a network for the first time it allows you to designate it as home, work or public. Home means you can share your resources and public means to hide your computer from the network while work is somewhere in the middle. In XP it is not so easy. I wanted to hide my PC from the network for several reasons (I run a VM and don't want it appearing in the corporate list of networked PCs!). It is also good to know how to do this because it reduces your risk of getting hacked. The easiest thing to do is to run the command: net config server /hidden:yes This will hide it from the network list but you can still ping it. If you want to go further than that you should change a couple more things: First, go to the properties of your network connection and disable file and printer sharing by unchecking the entry for it. Second, double click on "TCP/IP", click the "Advanced" button, then go to the "WINS" tab. Here, change the Netbios setting to disabled. This should do the trick!