UAC Confusion

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  1. Posts : 23
    Windows 7 Home Premium x64
    Thread Starter
       #11

    Below are the permissions for a folder "Whistler" which contains photos:

    UAC Confusion-whistler.png

    The entry for "HomeUsers" had a long SId reference for a split second before it switched to what is shown on the image snip.

    Does this shed any light? Surely I should be able to copy and move files to/from portable drives/flash drives etc without all this hassle!? It just seems odd that each of the 3 new laptops exhibits the same issue and I can't believe this is really how things are supposed to be!

    Thanks for all your assistance so far, it is very much appreciated.

    Andrew
      My Computer


  2. Posts : 23
    Windows 7 Home Premium x64
    Thread Starter
       #12

    And the properties for "My Pictures":

    UAC Confusion-my-pictures.png

    Same thing happened with the "Homeusers" account and the "Andrew" user has no permissions at all!?
      My Computer


  3. Posts : 31,242
    Windows 11 Pro x64 [Latest Release and Release Preview]
       #13

    The homeusers group is a variation of the Everyone group that relates to win7 specific sharing - looking at the image there you homeusers group only has limited rights to the folder - namely read access to the folders and files and the right to run programs in the folder, to change things in the folder you would need modify rights and to write new items (copy or move into the folder), you would need "write" rights.

    If you give your homeusers group full rights to the folder (Read/Write/Modify), this should allow you to work with the folder without issue.

    I assume you are using homegroup sharing here - the default sharing for homegroup is read only sharing so the above rights make some sense.

    I think that you should be able to (from the machine that originated the homegroup (1st machine set-up)), use the right click , Share with ... option to give full read/write access to the homegroup which should also cure your issues
      My Computers


  4. Posts : 23
    Windows 7 Home Premium x64
    Thread Starter
       #14

    Ok, so the HomeUser bit makes sense as I have indeed got that set up. Has the "Andrew" user got anything to do with it i.e no permissions? Is that not my main user account, according to the details in control panel it is?

    It's almost as if my main user account has not got full permissions for everything on my system but I don't know why this would have occurred as I have not messed with anything.
      My Computer


  5. Posts : 31,242
    Windows 11 Pro x64 [Latest Release and Release Preview]
       #15

    Ok the Andrew account is indeed your main user account and would normally have rights to at least your actual personal folders, something appears to have happened with the sharing via homegroup, either by design or accident, that has replaced these rights with those in the homeusers group - Your user should automatically be a member of homeusers.

    -------

    I, personally, always give my actual user full control of all my data folders as even when they are not shared it prevents any UAC prompts when I want to access them .

    -------

    I was brought up with the old school workgroup sharing routine so my way of setting up sharing on a three system network would be as follows ....

    Each machine would have a main account which would have ownership of all data folders on the machine. This user would also have full control rights to all data.

    On each machine I would create two other users with identical names to the Main users on the other machines.

    All data folders would be shared using advanced sharing

    I would use the main user on each machine to allocate rights to the machines data folders to the other two main users. These rights could be full for general items and either None or read only for more sensitive data.

    Of course it may be that the main user on all machines will be the same user and the other users may or may not be administrative users as you deem fit

    This setup will also work with homegroup sharing as the actual permissions used are the same with both workgroup and homegroup sharing
      My Computers


  6. Posts : 23
    Windows 7 Home Premium x64
    Thread Starter
       #16

    Thanks, your description makes total sense... and I have just made a discovery. For reasons unknown some of the other user folders seem to have lost all their permissions for the main user too, presumably when I re-pointed them to the data partition. But some of them (videos & music are fine).

    I am going to reset all the permissions for these folders, turn on UAC control again and see what happens. I'll post back to confirm success (or not)...

    Could this be a Win7 "undocumented feature"? I used to mess with XP alot but apart from partitioning and re-pointing the user files to the data partition I have not messed with anything at all on the pre-installed Win7 machines.

    Update: So far so good. 1 laptop seems to be sorted, UAC back on to the previous level and all permissions restored to the main user. I'll go through the same process with the other laptops tomorrow.

    Andrew
    Last edited by awrightUK; 14 Feb 2010 at 17:35. Reason: Update
      My Computer


  7. Posts : 31,242
    Windows 11 Pro x64 [Latest Release and Release Preview]
       #17

    The thing with XP was that the security was almost totally lacking as all users by default ran as full administrators, (as did any virus running under their account ),

    The permissions and user controls introduced with Vista and refined with win7 bring the security to the "average" systems that have been in use in more secure environments for many years. UAC ties all this together and reduces what used to be a "log out/log-in as someone else" scenario to a simple click :)
      My Computers


  8. Posts : 23
    Windows 7 Home Premium x64
    Thread Starter
       #18

    Everything seems to be fine now. I had to turn UAC off to reset all the permissions on one of the laptops but it is now back on on all of them with everything as it should be. Hopefully by granting the permissions to the user folders anything placed within them should work...

    Thanks for all the advice & help

    Andrew
      My Computer


  9. Posts : 31,242
    Windows 11 Pro x64 [Latest Release and Release Preview]
       #19

    Glad to hear you have things sorted :)
      My Computers


 
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