Vista Security Is Driving Me Mad

donny-gal

I have recently been using my laptop on insecure hotel wi-fi sites while travelling, so set my security to no sharing to protect myself, now its gone too far, Vista will not let me open up my C Drive via the Computer link. HELP!!

I cannot see how to free it, it talks about administrator rights, but I am the sole user on my own PC, so therefore, should be my own administrator.

Can someone point me in the right direction please!!!!

DG

Come back XP - all is forgiven.

Lorian

Heh. By default Vista has something called UAC enabled - User Access Control. This means even though you are a local admin everything actually runs as a normal user. If something needs admin priveliege you get a dark screen and it asks if its OK to run. You can right-click programs and say "run as sdministrator" for example. Or you can switch off UAC altogether (not generally recommended) For info on this see http://www.petri.co.il/disable_uac_in_windows_vista.htm

So I guess you need to turn it off for a while to sort out the permissions on your filing system, then turn it back on.

Conor_3

donny-gal wrote: »

I have recently been using my laptop on insecure hotel wi-fi sites while travelling, so set my security to no sharing to protect myself, now its gone too far, Vista will not let me open up my C Drive via the Computer link. HELP!!

I cannot see how to free it, it talks about administrator rights, but I am the sole user on my own PC, so therefore, should be my own administrator.

Can someone point me in the right direction please!!!!

DG

Come back XP - all is forgiven.

One of the reasons XP was so easy to infect was that the user was an "Administrator" so any malware had free reign to change any sytem files it pleased. With Vista, the user account is a user, not Admin, so malware can't change system files.

I can't see why you're having a problem. I can open mine up fine. It's only when I get to certain folders such as the Windows folder, that there's issues and then any file operation brings up a prompt telling me Admin permission is needed and to click "Continue, Skip or Cancel".

colin79666

You really shouldn't need to share your entire C drive anyway...

donny-gal

Just a footnote:
It seems when I got the Vista disks and tried a repair the system area was corrupted and would not repair. Ended up re-installing Vista. It said when I selected this that it could not install it as the disk was not formatted to NTFS which it must have been to have it installed originally, so had to reformat and install, now back live, luckily most of the data was on usb drives.

Thanks for the help guys
DG

sleep2much

I hate the Vista sharing too, I used to link all 4 computers in my house and swap and change at will with xp, but now I have to put this stuff in a "public folder", I keep setting things up like I used to on xp but always get unathorised........I've given up trying now.