Vista - Ridiculous!

Alright I'm getting pretty fed up with the troubles. I am new to vista, I had been dealing with a 98 and an xp for 8 years and had to get a vista a few days ago and I've never dealt with a vista before. I wasn't around for the setup and my brother did that. It's under his name. I changed the registered owner name to my name and thought that would solve my troubles but it didn't. I've tried meddling with C:\ Properties under Users and Groups but I have had no help. It also appears to say Shaun-PC and that's my brother's name. I thought changing the registered owner would've changed that too. No avail. I am having "Access Denied" problems even to my own External Hardrive from my xp. I can open the external hardrive folder, open files in it, etc but just today when I tried to modify and re-save an existing file it said that access is denied. I also cannot delete from the ext.hardrive either.

Why does this crap have to be so complicated and can anyone help me please? Lol.

Hi ILoveSeb,

The only way to change the username from "C:\Users\(username)" is to create a new Administrator account and delete the old one, or reinstall Vista.

User Account - Create


That may help with your permission problems with the external drive. If not, take ownership of the external drive to see if that allow access. See Method Two here:

Take Ownership of file

Shawn

Thank you for replying. I did the first set of instructions but I stayed on this account for the second set. Under command prompt when I typed /takeown /f J:\ (J: is the external hardrive) and it said SUCCESS: The file <or folder>: "J:\" now owned by user "Shaun-PC\Shaun".

But why is that? My name's Kelly. I changed the administrator name of the original account to Kelly and the registered user as well but it still says my brother's name. So there's no way I can take FULL charge of this main account that my brother created or do I have to go to the new one I had just created from the tutorial and do this command prompt thing over?

ILoveSeb,

The Administrator account you are using named Kelly is the same as the one your brother created with his name. You can change the name and registered user name from your brother's name to Kelly, but it will still not change it's name at the C:\Users\Shaun location. It will only change the folder name you see in the Start menu and in User Accounts in the Control Panel. You should have full control of this account other than giving permission for the UAC (User Account Control) prompt. If you want to change your brother's name from that location, you must create a new Administrator account and delete the old one, or reinstall Vista. You just had to take control of the external drive since it was from XP and not Vista.

To truly have full control of Vista, you will need to enable the built-in Administrator account. However, everything installed on the computer will have full access to. UAC will no longer be protecting you in this account.

Administrator Account

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Much oblige, I really appreciate it!

Your welcome Kelly.

I have a folder inside of my external hardrive where I save Text Files that I create from WordPad. Right now I have been attempting to save a file to it but it says:

Access to J:\Text Documents\My Music List.rtf was denied.

ILoveSeb,

Have you already taken ownership of it?

Double check to make sure that it didn't get set to Read-only somehow, and that it is not open in another location or program.

Yes it was Read-Only but I unchecked that option, tried again, no avail.

I'm also having the permission issue when trying to delete a folder/file from the external hardrive.

Kelly,

I'm afraid that I do not know what else to suggest other then backing up the contents of the drive and see if formating it with Vista, then adding the files back will let you have full access to it since it was originally formated from XP.

Shawn