Have you ever browsed over to another PC on your network using “network neighborhood”, and then connected to one of the file shares? Without a drive letter, how do you disconnect yourself once you’ve done so?

Really confused as to what I’m talking about? Let’s walk through the process. First, imagine that you browse through and connect to a share, entering your username and password to gain access.

The problem is that you stay connected, and there’s no visible way to disconnect yourself. If you try and shut down the other PC, you’ll receive a message that users are still connected. So let’s disconnect!

Open up a command prompt, and then type in the following:

net use

This will give you a list of the connected drives, including the ones that aren’t actually mapped to a drive letter. To disconnect one of the connections, you can use the following command:

net use /delete \\server\sharename

For example, in this instance we’d disconnect like so:

net use /delete \\192.168.1.205\root$

Now when you run the “net use” command again, you’ll see that you’ve been properly disconnected.

If you wanted to actually connect to a share without mapping a drive letter, you can do the following:

net use /user:Username \\server\sharename Password

You could then just pop \\server\sharename into a Windows Explorer window and browse the files that way. Note that this technique should work exactly the same in any version of windows.