Why can my friends MBP write to a NTFS external hard drive and mine cannot?

I bought and formatted my friends 13" 2012 MBP which is running on Mountain Lion and I did not download any extra programs or software to enable his MBP to write on a NTFS external but for some reason he is able to write to it and I cannot, I have a 15" 2011 MBP. I assumed it was the OS since I was running on Lion, but I just upgraded to Maverick last night and it still won't let me write.
So what's the deal? How can he write to it while I can't?
Thanks,
John

There is (was, don't; know if it still works) a hack you can use to enable NTFS writing on OS X. However as it was never officially supported by Apple it really is best to consider this experimental and not rely on it. If you need to use NTFS drives for real work you should look into the many 3rd party extensions.
For the native OS X hack see:
How to manually enable NTFS read and write in OS X | MacFixIt ...
How to Enable NTFS Write Support in Mac OS X - OS X Daily
10.6: Enable native NTFS read/write support - Mac OS X Hints
among others. But as I wrote this is really a parlour trick.

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Message was edited by: the fiend

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Why can my friends MBP write to a NTFS external hard drive and mine cannot?

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