Vista & admin rights?

[Tuomas]

Hiya

I'm here at my girlfriend's, trying to fix her laptop. She has an amazing skill of making a mess of everything computer related she touches. well, I noticed I can't really get anything that I want done with her account, even though it says I'm supposed to have admin rights to this. On XP it was pretty simple, and yeah, though I'm not that familiar with Vista yet, I think I know what I'm doing, but don't know how to get the Vista convinced. What I need is to be able to modify the interface as the admin, and then create another account for my girlfriend for her own computer, so that she couldn't break it anymore. I know there are programs that help you tweak the rights somehow, but that seems silly. I thought, if anyone knew how this could be done, they might want to share, ok? Please, it gets really annoying getting the error message all the time. I just want to get this thing in order and maje sure my girlfriend doesn't break it again. Thanks, if you can help me at all.

Tuomas

[LimpingFish]

If you're logged in as admin you should be getting a dialog box, asking you to confirm that fact, everytime you try to change something that requires admin rights.

If you're getting a denial dialog, then you're not logged in as admin.

Go to the Start menu, and hover the mouse cursor over the little arrow down in the right hand corner (beside the yellow power icon, and the lock icon), and choose "Log Off" from the pop-up menu. This will log you out as the current user, and allow you to see what accounts are available to log in with. There should be an admin user profile available.

If there isn't, well, we'll deal with that when we come to it.

[Mantra of Doom]

In Vista, if the User Account Control is on, you will have to right click and "Run as Administrator" on certain things. If you want to turn off the UAC for the time being while you fix things, hit the windows key +R to get the Run dialog box. Once there, type msconfig.

In the Tools Tab of the System Configuration box, there is a line that says "Disable UAC" ... highlight that and hit Launch. You'll get a command box that says "The operation was successful". You can now reboot without UAC. When you need to turn it back on, you can do the same thing.


I know I'm in the minority here but I really like Vista. All you need to do is fix the UAC and the ipv6 little oddities and you're good to go. Of course, that's just my experiences... and I'll shut up before I get mobbed...

[Tuomas]

Yeah, turned off UAC, hope this helps.

Oh, and yeah, I am sure I was running this as the admin, as there was only one account to use, which according to Vista was in fact the admin account. My plan now is to take over it and make a new one for my gf, as I said.

You said hit the +R button... I'm not familiar with such a button. I know how to open the run dialog box with XP, but it seems to be different with Vista.

[LimpingFish]

No, I agree. Vista isn't as bad as everybody makes out. But it's file transfer speeds still suck and the UAC can be a pain. And it hogs a lot of resources, especially if you have AERO on. If Microsoft trimmed a lot of the bloat out of Vista, we might be halfway to a decent OS.

I have a suspicious feeling that Vista's lifespan will be a lot shorter than XP's, though.

[Snake]

I don't know about Vista, but on XP the Admin account isn't available unless you're in Safe Mode.

Hope this helps a little,


--Snake

[Mantra of Doom]

Hit the key that brings up the start menu on the keyboard... press the Windows key and R, it will pop up with the Run box. Fastest way to get to Run in both XP and Vista.

Vista's SP1 really fixed a lot of the transfer speed... oh and running 2 gigs of ram helps with the resource hog that goes into making everything "pretty". Vista's main problem is to try to compete with OS X's philosophy is being shiny and so simple to use it's hard. But oh well, Windows Seven is coming out next year, so there's another OS for people to hate.

[Tuomas]

I've got more problems now. Basically she had to save all her music and pictures to the My Music & My Pictures folder. Now for some reason the thing allowed her to save there, but won't allow her to open the folder again, so all her music and picture files are inside the folder. the computer states she has no rights to enter thise folders.

At the same time, I made my admin account, and tried to look at her files. Sor some reason, when I enter her Files folder, there's no My Pictures and no My Music. I thought it was up to me as the admin to give her the rights to those folders, but apparently I can't find them and I donät even have the rights to most of these.

The thing that I don't understand really, is that for a while, she'd have all her music and photos available at the folders mentioned. But then all of a sudden she just lost her rights, even before I meddled in as the admin. Suddenly she just couldn't open the folder anymore, and now all her music and photos are gone somewhere, though they are on this computer all right. We just can't get to them anyway. I really don't know what to do. I managed to give her rights to the My Videos folder somehow, but the same ticking the rights boxes wouldn't help with these, AND, one shouldn't be required to give rights to their own folders, when they already had them for a while.

I'm really not seeing how this whole thing is supposed to work. Can anyone please help me?


Right! So I had a rights-group called Everyone, that had rights to the folder in everyway. It wasn't selected as the owner of the folder or anything, it just was there, newly added, though none of us had done that. anyway, I just removed it, didn't do anything to the rights or anything, and I managed to access the folders now. But I don't think that means problem solved, as this could happen again at any point. I just went to Properties ->"the third leaf in english" protection etc -> "Modify", right? -> selected the group from the list and pressed delete. But I need to prevent this from happening again.

[LimpingFish]

Things like you describe can happen when somebody has admin rights when they shouldn't. New accounts and such can only be created by an admin, so setting up your girlfriends account as non-admin should prevent massive changes to the system.

Make sure that you, as admin, also have all the permission boxes ticked in your account; even admins can be blocked from certain functions unless they enable them first.

You shouldn't have many problems if her account is given access (full access to read files, write, files, etc) to non-admin folders only.

Oh, and make sure Vista is up to date (SP1, etc) as a few minor changes have been made to how the UAC works.

[Tuomas]

Could someone please explain why suddenly after installing Last.fm audio scrobbler plug-in, Winamp started asking the admin password before starting up? the best thing about it is, I can just close the admin rights box from the red X in the upper right corner, and then play winamp as normal, BUT I can't just press OK without writing the password. Why does it even have to ask, when before the thing used to work properly, and now it doesn't even need the password of the admin at all? Both Winamp and the audioscrobbler plugin should at this point be installed through the non-admin user.

So far, honestly, I've had nothing but problems with this admin system, and swear to God, if it stays like this, I'll go Ubuntu once I get a new computer.

[BarkingPup]

Hmmm... I have Last.fM but not Winamp (I think.. not sure what Winamp is) so I'm not really sure if this will help all that much... but, anywho. If I can't do something I turn off the 'user control box' thingy that pops up every time you do something (handy for stuff like SecuROM but otherwise quite annoying and useless).

I have to ask if anything else was changed after installing Last.fm, like an upgrade for something else. I thought the glitch of having Windows Live Onecare block Windows Live Onecare from accessing the internet was from an patch I had installed. It turned out that something else had caused it and uninstalling that stopped the problem. If I recall correctly it was from the latest and greatest Vista upgrade for some new fangled bloatware I didn't know was on my computer (as if screwing up Windows Defender wasn't enough fun).

I know Vista has a thingy in... um, control panel? That tells you of any conflicts happening. Have you checked that out?

[Trent R]

Does the Winamp icon have the admin addition to it (the little shield)? What about certain shortcuts? Try rightclicking and choosing 'Open file location' until you get to the exe, does it require admin there? Have you checked 'Run this program as an administrator' under the Properties>Compatibility?

Just random thoughts and suggestions, so I have no idea if they're actually relevant.

~Trent
PS-I actually like Vista. I wouldn't suggest upgrading, but it's on a new comp---I say keep it.

[Tuomas]

What about certain shortcuts? Try rightclicking and choosing 'Open file location' until you get to the exe, does it require admin there? Have you checked 'Run this program as an administrator' under the Properties>Compatibility?

Nope, no little shield anywhere. Not in shortcuts in start menu or desktop. The 'run this program as an administrator' is unchecked. Should it be?

BarkingPup: I wish I knew what thingy you're talking about.

The one thing that really doesn't impress me, is that after it asks for the password, pressing cancel or closing the box doesn't do anything, just let's me use the program as usual. That really looks like a stupid bug to me.

[Trent R]

Well, if the admin thing is unchecked, then it shouldn't pop up the window. Since it is, I'm guessing* it's probably not a Windows problem  and it's a possibly a Last.fm/Winamp conflict or something. I don't use Winamp anymore and I've never use Last.fm so I'm afraid I can't help. Maybe it's a version incompatability? Have you tried reinstalling Winamp or running an update?

Although you could try checking that box (on the main program), running it, closing the program, then unchecking the box. That might the smack on the head that Vista needs.


~Trent
*keyword of the sentence