Hi, Michael.
It's like the new lock on your front door. It keeps the burglar out because
he doesn't have a key. You can easily come in, of course, because you DO
have the key. But you do have to keep the key handy to keep from locking
yourself out.
Yes, it takes a mindset adjustment because we've been running earlier
Windows versions which had locks that didn't always work and were easy to
bypass. Vista is much more careful about making sure the locks work.
You can, of course, disable the locks by turning off UAC (User Access
Control). But that puts Vista back into the same unguarded state as WinXP
and predecessors. If you choose to disable UAC, don't blame Vista if a
burglar comes in and wreaks havoc.
We can also put locks on internal doors of our home or our office. Then the
family or staff can roam through most of the place but will need special
keys to get into the locked rooms. Vista sets up different permissions for
each "User" so that certain areas are off-limits unless we can produce the
password. And a few areas are so critical to the whole system that, like
the control room in many facilities, even the boss needs a key to enter that
danger area.
In Vista, there can be several members of the Administrators group.
Generally, their keys will get them almost anywhere in the system. But even
they can't just go barging into other Users' private spaces or into the
danger zones. When it becomes necessary to go there, the Administrators
must use the Master Key. If you are the Administrator AND you log on with
the Administrator's credentials, then you can get the Master Key.
After using Vista for a while, most of us adjust our mindset and get
comfortable with the new security and appreciate it. For the first week or
two, it seems very intrusive because we are continually installing new
drivers and applications and it seems that we need to give ourselves
permission for every keystroke. And the Indexing Service is busy working in
the background, building the Index from scratch, and it seems the hard drive
is often making strange noises and blinking the light. But all this should
settle down in several days. Then UAC won't intrude except when we need to
do some system maintenance, like run Device Manager or Disk Management.
Or when we try to store a file where Vista thinks it doesn't belong, like
putting data in Program Files or saving any file into the Root of the System
Drive (C:\). Those have always been protected areas, but the protection was
very lax - until Vista. Now we need to give ourselves permission to violate
the protection. We can do it, but we must do it explicitly, not by mistake
or accident.
When you need to do some maintenance tasks, you might want to open an
"elevated command prompt" window. To do this, right-click on Command Prompt
in the Start menu and choose Run as Administrator; you'll need to furnish
the Administrator password to get past this point. The window that opens
will say "Administrator:Command Prompt" in its Title Bar. Since you had to
use the password to get this far, Vista knows that you have permission to do
almost anything. Any application or command you start in this window will
"run elevated" without a prompt for permission. (I use this elevated
command prompt so often that I've created a shortcut for it and put the icon
into Quick Launch. I still have to furnish the password each time I open
this window, but it takes only a moment and it reminds me that I need to be
careful here.)
The payoff for all this is that people who don't know the password can't
come in your computer's front door or wander into the wrong rooms. And if
you are ever asked for permission to do something that YOU did not command
the computer to do, then you know know that some stranger - local or
online - is trying to violate your protections.
Sorry for the long answer to a short question, Michael. But there is a lot
of hidden meaning behind the error message that is causing your frustration.
A shorter answer: You might need to Take Ownership of the folder you are
trying to delete. Is it a protected system folder? Or does it belong to
another User, perhaps one that existed in WinXP but did not migrate to
Vista?
RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP
(Running Windows Live Mail 2008 in Vista Ultimate x64 SP1)
