(Windows) permissions

Permissions are really grinding my gears now, and are approaching DRM levels of annoyance.

I’m in the group Administrators on my local PC. I am the Owner of the C drive and everything on it. User account control is fully off. I select Run As Administrator.
But still this program (VMware) doesn’t have permission to write a new license key to the registry! Oh great, and I can’t even do stuff like change windows firewall settings. :mad:

What pisses me off is that this is the thing that everyone says is better in Win7 versus Vista. How is it any better? It looks the same to me except it makes it more difficult to access the real admin or turn off UAC. Oh, and I seem to get “access denied” on file I/O operations more often now, so that’s another bit of welcome progress.

And before you say it’s just me or whatever, try googling win7 permissions. You’ll find hundreds of threads, including on MS sites, that play out like this:

OP: I can’t do X
Expert: Yeah, you need to select “Run As Administrator” to do that
OP: I did that, it doesn’t work
Expert: Fuck knows then

First, you do know what VMWare is right? (I’m assuming so)

Are you logged into the correct instance for the registry that you’re trying to manipulate?

Good luck. I hate Windows. Maybe set up a Linux box and only install the Windows instances that you need?

I’m not quite sure that you mean, but yes I’m familiar with VMware and I’m just setting the license key for the VMware application itself. So at this point I am not running a VM.

Have you tried turning it off and back on?

I misunderstood, I wish you luck.

Why can’t you change your Windows firewall settings?

What error messages are you recieving - for VMWare and for the firewall, separately.

What are you using for antivirus/anti-malware?

See? Classic “blame the victim.”

I wasn’t really fishing for answers in this pit thread, just venting.

In both cases I get an error dialog that I do not have sufficient permission to complete the action. In the case of VMware, it more specificially says I don’t have permission to write the key blah to the registry (yes, if I were actually logging this as a support issue I would take down the actual text).

That’s because the registry has certain parts of it that even an administrator can’t write to–it has to be SYSTEM. And if Vmware needs to be SYSTEM to put in a registration code, and it can’t elevate to SYSTEM, then Vmware is the program with the problem.

Also, since you run everything as Administrator, it’s more like than usual that you are infected with malware. Some malware may have protected the registry. UAC wasn’t created for nothing.

I know that in Pit threads people like to take the contrary view, and play devil’s advocate etc, but defending UAC now? Yikes.

It’s widely seen as the reason Vista was considered a flop and the fact that it’s been “tamed” in Win7 is often cited as a reason why Win7 is superior (as I alluded).

Obviously it was created for a reason, the issue is whether it fulfils its objective and whether the pros outweigh the cons.
Oh, and how it compares to other (Linux) user account models. Good luck finding someone that thinks it’s an improvement.

Anyway, I don’t want to rant to much about UAC because the other permissions issues bother me much more.

I disagree. I never owned a Vista computer, but I’ve found UAC in Windows 7 to work perfectly fine. The everyday account on my computer is a standard user. When needed I have no problem with the UAC security check to make sure I want to run something, or the occasional need to run programs as Administrator.

I’ve never worried about root level access on Linux machines quite as much, so I guess it is better there. Then again, I never worried about malware there, either.

I’m sorry you have had some problems with changing settings, and running a program as Admin. Since you have UAC turned off, I’m not sure where the problem lies. That sucks. I hope you get it figured out.

And Smeghead wins the thread!

And here is where you display your ignorance. In a properly designed system, ‘admin’ accesses everything. Separating “admin” from “system” is Microsoft’s way of getting around the fact that their system design gave ultimate power to idiots. And their ‘certification’ gives training in stupidity. Software not under the direct control of ‘admin’ shouldn’t be able to elevate itself to ‘system’. That’s the ‘admin’s’ job. Sorry, BigT, but this is a typical example of how Microsoft fucks up on a daily basis. And, yet another example of the fact that you are a know-nothing idiot when you pontificate on Winblows.

??? It was a solicitation of additional information about the specifics of the problem. I’m not blaming anyone.

If you copy down the exact message, especially any codes, it can help find the answer. But I guess I don’t care if you don’t care.

It sounds like you either have a rootkit virus or your registry’s corrupt. I think the UAC problems are a symptom here.

I think the problem is simply that my everyday user account is on a domain.
I can create a non-domain user account and that account can do things that my domain account cannot (yes, even though the domain account was the one that created the non-domain account).

It’s pretty frustrating. e.g. Hereis a screengrab of me displayed within the Administrators group and being told I need to be an Administrator to complete this operation at the same time.