What is it with Vista and "Access is Denied"?

[Deadjasper]

How can I turn this BS off and have Vista act like XP? It's my f*cking computer and I'll delete or move whatever I want.

System Defender is disabled and so is User Account Control.

TIA

[tuffgong]

How can I turn this BS off and have Vista act like XP? It's my f*cking computer and I'll delete or move whatever I want.

System Defender is disabled and so is User Account Control.

TIA

I don't know why but I cracked up when I read this post.

[Mithent]

As with UAC, this is a security measure; some areas of the system don't allow anything but the system to write to them so that malware and badly-behaved programs (running as you) aren't allowed to mess with them. You can probably take ownership of them with an administrative account, but you're stripping out all the added security from the system and bringing it back to an XP world where all programs run as administrator and have free reign to mess with the system.

(That's a good way to think of it, actually: your permissions aren't just things that you, the user, are allowed to actively do while giving commands to the computer, they're the permissions you're granting to all the code running under your account. You might trust yourself not to delete important things, but do you trust every program you run? UAC allows you to separate programs you trust and those you don't.)

Windows Defender has nothing to do with it, and UAC only tangentially.

[Deadjasper]

OK, what I'm trying to do is delete 2 folders, Windows.old and Windows.old.000. Both of these are left over remnants of 2 blotched windows installs caused by a problem with my SATA drivers. These folders are useless and just taking up space.

[nessus]

If you really want XP behavior, reformat and install XP. After all, like you said, its your computer.

If you really want the file security it to be more like security lauded and unbreakable XP, go to the root of your c: drive, take ownership of everything and give your user full control of the whole file system. Actually, that makes Vista more like Windows 2000. Windows XP had tighter file system control than Windows 2000, and I remember the whining caused by that back when XP came out a well.

"My users have to have admin rights because my horribly coded custom app wants to make temp files in the root of c:, or in the Program Files directory in their user context. I know I should have coded it to use the user's temp directory, but I'm too lazy to write 5 lines of code."

If I had a buck for every time I heard that back then... Actually, I just heard the parts not in red. I'm confusing my inner voice with the red parts being what other people should have said, with what was actually said.

[nessus]

OK, what I'm trying to do is delete 2 folders, Windows.old and Windows.old.000. Both of these are left over remnants of 2 blotched windows installs caused by a problem with my SATA drivers. These folders are useless and just taking up space.

Take ownership and delete. Problem resolved. Vista re-installs leave the previous folders owned by the previous install as a security measure, if you don't reformat the drive during installation. It also does that for Windows XP upgrades.

[Deadjasper]

OK, I found the proper solution. Windows cleanup has an option to delete old Windows installs. This got rid of it.