I cannot save a document to my own C: drive. It tells me I need the permission of an administrator. I am the only user; I have checked, and my account is an administrator account. I’ve set the proggram itself to run in administrator mode - in two tabs - and tried running it as an administrator program, and nothing works.
Absolutely everything I do requires I click at least two, and sometimes four or five, permissions to do things.
I thought fresh installations of W7 had that ‘feature’ switched off by default (or at least asked you if you wanted it on or off the first time you use windows).
Technically, that isn’t an upgrade as it isn’t possible to do it via a method supported by Microsoft.
If you somehow managed to put 7 on top of XP without re-initializing the hard drive, that could very well be your problem. Can you clarify how you got here from there?
This is deliberate and a security measure. You shouldn’t be trying to save stuff there anyway. If you absolutely need to, you must run the application as an administrator by right-clicking the shortcut icon and selecting Run As Administrator. Yes, I know you’ve said you’ve tried it, but it’s just worked for me. It occurs to me that the application you’re launching may itself be launching a sub-process which doesn’t inherit the admin rights.
Since I don’t like my data being in the \users directory structure, I ran Explorer as an Admin and created a directory called Data. I then assigned permissions to it.
This doesn’t help at all. I get the same kind of thing as the OP… the problem is that Windows is always asking me to grant administrator access in order to do this or that (which just requires clicking “OK”) when I am already an administrator and logged in as such. By default the administrator role has all permissions enabled so what you posted is useless.
Why is there an extra dialog box asking me to grant administrator access when I’m logged in as the administrator? That’s what maddens me.
Never had a problem creating folders in C:\ First thing I do is create C:\Install copy all my apps & driver updates to that folder and run them.
The protected folders are in C:\Documents & Settings those aren’t real folders. They are pointers to C:\Users.
A lot of crap in C:\Users is protected. Even as Admin I can’t access C:\Users\John unless I’m signed in as John. The solution is to avoid those damn things. My docs go in C:\MyDocs.
Another protected folder is the All Users desktop folder. At work my job is setting up the desktop for new employees. With XP I copied Icons/shortcuts to All Users Desktop from my admin account. Win 7 has tripled my work load because now I have to get the employees password, log in as that person, and copy the shortcuts to their desktop. I curse the sorry bastards at Microsoft for this grief every time I’m forced to do it.
I’ve been using Win7 for almost a year now, and i really like it overall. Powerful, stable, and generally useful.
But the whole permissions/groups/users arrangement is completely ridiculous. I realize that having this sort of security feature is a Good Thing, but the complexity of the setup and the myriad different places where permissions and access can be changed make it much more confusing than it needs to be, IMO.
The issue of writing to the C: drive has never really been an issue for me, because i almost never use it, except to install program (which requires Admin access anyway). My main HDD has two partitions, C: and F:, and C: is only used for Windows, other programs, the main user accounts, etc.; documents and other files are only ever saved to F: or to the second hard drive. And my everyday working account is not an Administrator account; i work using a limited account.
Yeah, Microsoft has pretty much made the Users personal documents folders useless.
At our office we set up a documents and a excel folder on C:. That way if Jane calls in sick, I can still access any documents she’s working on. I don’t like getting Jane’s password and logging in. That’s very poor security practice.
The C:\Excel folder and C:\MyDocs folders are shared on each pc. We have a solid firewall to keep the shares safe.
I was running a NT file server for our docs. Every staff account’s home directory was on the file server. It finally died after 9 years. Once we can replace it and purchase licenses for new server software, I’ll move our office docs back to a central location and recreate the staff home directorys. Right now, our dept budget is too tight to replace the server.
Also check the ownership tab. Changing the owner of the C: drive to Administrators should solve a whole lot of your problems, and as far as I can tell doesn’t have any negative consequences.
Is there some reason why everyone is dodging the public folders? It’s basically what xp called “shared documents”. Especially in shared environments like small businesses it is much easier to manage than all of the other permissions stuff. If you have multiple 7 machines and form a homegroup it’s really easy as well as fairly secure since trust is only extended to the members of the homegroup as opposed to just another member of the same LAN.