Folder Permissions for Executable files

I don't know very much about server administration and even less about Windows server administration, but I have to put some .exe downloads on a server and I was told that all I have to do to make it so they can't be executed on the server is set the folder permissions so nothing in it can run. Is that correct? Is there any down side to doing that?

The only downside would be if you had an asp page or some other script in the folder that needed execute permissions, then it wouldn't run. And I'm not certain about .exe files, there is a script execute permission that will block script files. Why not zip the files, or change the file extensions?

The folder will only have these downloads so that won't be a problem. I wish it was so easy to convince our marketing department that our users are savvy enough to unzip a file but since no one in marketing is that clever they can't imagine that anyone else is.

Normally if you give a link to an exe file it gets downloaded to the browser, not run on the server. I think you should be safe by changing the permissions, just test things out well.

Yeah, I'm going to test it both ways and see what happens. Thanks again for your help.