Okay, so my computer died and I had to replace it. The new model has Vista pre-installed on it. Now, I’m finding it really rather annoying. Every time I want to do anything at all it asks me for permission. I want to move a file from folder A to folder B. Up pops a dialog box teling me that I need permission to do this. Click OK The screen dims and freezes for a few seconds. Up pops a dialog box asking me if I am willing to give permission. Click yes. Computer thinks about it for a few seconds before coming up with a message telling me permission denied. Denied? My own files on my own computer and it’s denying me permission?
Is this a standard feature of Vista, or is it due to some security settings the computer shop has assumed I’d want? And is there any way to stop it?
I think I’m logged on as administrator. At least the Administrator account is the only active one, there’s a guest account which is disabled.
It’s not even consistent. If I try moving the same file again another day, it works fine, and doesn’t even ask me for permission.
Yes, this is standard. It’s called User Access Control. You can turn it off, and many people do, but IME turning it off stops some apps from adding themselves to the Start Menu when you install them.
FWIW you are (most likely) not logged in as adminstrator. You are logged in as with an account that has administrator privs. This is not the same thing! The problem has been that too many people who don’t know what they are doing[sup]1[/sup] have been running XP as Administrator and been hit by malware. UAC is Microsoft’s ham-fisted way of stopping this.
[1] This is not the fault of the users! They shouldn’t need to know better.
I just went and found this. FWIW, I am logged in as the admin and have to grant permissions, but haven’t been denied (so far).
To turn off UAC - Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> System Configuration From the System Configuration window, select the “Tools” tab. Select “Disable UAC” and click “Launch”. You will have to reboot to complete this action.
If it’s telling you NEED permission (and don’t have it), and not asking FOR permission, that’s just Vista being Vista. An awful lot of places in the system tree that were accessible to XP just…aren’t in Vista, even to users with Administrative access.
This is especially true of things like “All Users’ Documents and Settings” from a previous XP install, for example. So far as I know, there’s simply no way to access these files at all – I reboot into XP (triple boot computer: XP/Vista-64/Ubuntu) when I need to do it; I’ve never found a way to get to them from Vista, even as an administrator.
There are some who would say the “solution” to your problem is to get rid of your hard drive and install XP. The statement “Vista doesn’t work” is not entirely indefensible IMHO.
If you’re logged in with admin rights, you can give yourself access to folders that you don’t have permission for by default. I ran into this little gotcha after I upgraded an XP machine to Vista.
FWIW, I’ve had to do the same thing under XP, although that was a case of a folder created by buggy software, not an intentional situation.
If you’ve restored your files from backup, you may well have restored the Access Control Lists associated with them. You may need to reset the security permissions. To do this, make sure you’re logged in with Admin privs, right-click the directory, select Properties, then Security. Click on the Advanced button and then the Owner tab. Click the Edit button to change the Owner to yourself. Don’t forget to do the whole tree by checking the ‘Replae owner on subcontainers and objects’ box . After you’ve done that, you can set permissions for other user IDs of your computer.
There’s a file I want to move. I’ve set the ownership on it to my account, I’ve got adminstrative rights with my account, I’ve set permissions for “everyone” to full access, and I’m STILL not allowed to move it.