Hiding a Windows NT computer from the Network Neighborhood
There are a couple of good reasons why you might want to hide a Windows NT computer from the Network Neighborhood.
First of all, building and maintaining the list of computers you see in Network Neighborhood takes a lot of network traffic, and reduces the overall performance of your network.
If you have computers that don't share anything (such as computers running Windows NT Workstation), you might want to prevent them from being listed in Network Neighborhood.
In this scenario, you can stop the computer from showing up by stopping the Server service.
In Control Panel, double-click Services.
From the list of Services, select Server, then click Startup.
Change the Startup type to Manual, then click OK.
Now click Stop to stop the Server service.
The other reason why you might want to hide a computer from the Network Neighborhood is to make it inaccessible to users who are simply browsing the network.
To do so, run the following command in a Command Prompt window:
net config server /hidden:yes
This command hides the computer from the Network Neighborhood, but leaves the Server service running.
Thus, you can still connect to the computer by mapping a drive to a shared folder.
Note: It will take a few minutes for your computer to drop out of the Network Neighborhood.