Vista Security is a Real Pain (and not very secure)

Yesterday I put my old slow hdd from my laptop in an external enclosure so that I could easily access any data that I had on my computer before the upgrade.  Unfortunately this plan got thwarted when I attempted to access my documents folder (ie f:UsersNick…..).  This raised a security access denied error, despite the fact that I’m an administrator on this computer.  Even if I ran Windows Explorer as administrator it still wouldn’t allow me to access this folder.

Luckily one of the other people in the Silicon Beach House still has a Windows XP machine so I asked them if they could open the folder, which they could no problem.  Great, so Vista has added an additional level of security that is a complete waste of time since the folder can be accessed on older computer….?

To disable this security “feature” I simply selected the Users folder and forced an update of security permissions so that “Everyone” has full access.  This seems to work and now I can access everything on the external drive.  What a waste of an hour of my time!

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