Administrator & saving difficulties - new laptop

waterwatereverywhere

Hi,

We inherited a laptop from a family member and hope someone might be able to help with some glitches.

Firstly, he had entered his name as the "administrator" and there is a folder in his name.

We would like to change this to our name - please can anyone advise how to do this - to make us administrators?

We also have some problems when trying to SAVE DOCUMENTS. We keep getting the following message:

"You don't have permission to save in this location. Contact the administrator to obtain permission".

This means we are "defaulted" to saving in the "My Documents" folder and then have to go and move the file once it has been saved in My Documents to our preferred location.

The SECOND PROBLEM is the laptop has the TRIAL version of Word on it. Every time we open an existing Word document it will only open in "Read only mode". This means that if we want to edit and save the doc we have to save it with a new name and then go and delete the previous version and replace. VERY TEDIOUS!! Is this because we only have the trial version or is this something to do with administrator approval etc.

Would be very grateful for any advice on how to solve these difficulties. Many thanks in advance.

closed

factory restore it, then you can set it up how you want

or create a new user

a trial is a trial, if it's expired you either have to buy it, or use one of the free office alternatives, however what you're saying sounds more like a rights issue, which one of the 2 options above may help with

if you are trying to save to c:\ ie the root, that's always protected by default.

Cisco001

Use libreoffice or open office.

tyllwyd

Do you have the password for the current administrator account on the laptop?

EchoLocation

If you know the password for the Administrator account you can manage your other user profiles from there. If this is Windows XP there should also be a hidden Adminstrator account you can access via safe mode which has usually not been assigned a password.

As has already been suggested, get rid of the trial version of Word and download libreoffice free.

waterwatereverywhere

Hi

Many thanks for the replies.

It is a HP laptop - around a year to two old. It has Windows 7 Home Premium.

I don't have any password info but the laptop has never asked me for a laptop on log on and have been using it fine for several months now without password.

Would prefer NOT to have to do factory restore as have tons of stuff stored on it now and have uploaded some programs so would prefer not to have to start from scratch if there is another way...?!?

What I have is a folder called "C:\user\JOBLOGGS\AppData\local\microsoft...."

This is the folder that has a locked padlock against it and is the administrator account.

The "properties" tab for this folder says it is "read only".

In Windows Explorer I opened this file, right clicked to get to the "properties" tab and then changed the name putting in my own name. I then deselected the "read only" mode and it told me it was removing the "read only" mode from all the files/folders. It took a long time going through this process and told me it had been done.

However, when I re-booted it was back to how it was and had re-applied the read only mode and changed the name back to the original.

Sorry for dimness but very grateful if anyone has any further advice on this.

It seems that the fact that the whole folder is set to "read only" is the reason why I've been unable to save any amendments to any files and have to keep saving new copies of everything rather than this being caused by a Word Trial issue as I originally thought.

Thx in advance.

pompeyred

The folder you are trying to change is because Windows requires it to exist in the way that Windows created it. It is named that because there is a user account associated with it.

If you are an administrator you can set passwords/change user accounts by going to the control panel or by opening the start menu and typing in user accounts.

Pikeyp

Sounds to me like you already have the 'real administrator' account enabled!

To check this , type 'secpol.msc' in the search box (without quotes) and press enter ... you should the 'Local Security Policy' window pop-up , now in the l/h column click on 'Local Policies > Security Options'

Now look in the r/h column and at the very top you should see 'Accounts: Administrator account status' and whether it's enabled or not.

If it's enabled then this is the account you are using , in this case I would shut down this pop-up and create another 'normal' account.

To do this go to the 'User Accounts' section of the Control Panel and create a new user with a suitable password ... use your own name if you like!

Now re-boot the PC and you should get a log-in with two accounts ... the 'Administrator' account and the one you just created. Log in with you new account!

Once you are happy with whats going on and can make sure all your personal files are in the right place (ie .. in your account folders!) you can go back to the 'Local Security Policy' window and disable the 'real' Administrator account ... you can always bring it back if needed another day!

Good luck!