Disable UAC controlling the saving of files in Windows 7

Question

I recently upgraded to Windows 7 from XP and I am getting used to the new UAC it has; I don't mind the extra clicks to install programs and what not, however what is annoying me is that files I have created previously on XP it now won't let me save them after editing them - I have tried in multiple text editors to save files and I keep getting access denied errors.

From my research I have found this is likely due to UAC; I noticed you need to right click the file or something and select run as administrator; I am a coder and work with dozens of files on a daily basis so I have no intention of having to do something like that for every file I want to work with.

Is there anyway to disable this behaviour without disabling the whole UAC?

Answer 1

Make sure your permissions are set correctly in your drive's folders.

You can check this by going to a folder where it tells you "Access Denied", entering Properties > Security, and making sure that the Users group has Full control checked. If the Users group is not present, you can remedy this by clicking the Edit... button, then Add..., then typing in Users and checking the Full control box.

Answer 2

You have to take ownership of a folders/files. Try this:

• Right-click the folder that you want to take ownership of, and then click Properties.
• Click the Security tab, click Advanced, and then click the Owner tab.
• Click Edit. Administrator permission required If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation.
• Click the name of the person you want to give ownership to.
• If you want that person to be the owner of files and subfolders in this folder, select the Replace owner on subcontainers and objects check box.
• Click OK, and you're done.

That's it!

Answer 3

On Windows 7, just disable UAC, it was designed to annoy users and put pressure on software developers at the time and has long since served its purpose. There are more effective ways to protect your machine that have a different philosophy than UAC did. UAC was designed "to change the ecosystem", and it did, and now it's done.

That said, if you're developing software, it at least serves the purpose of notifying you, a developer, that your application is doing something that activates a prompt.

By the way, if you're a developer, unless you have a specific reason to stay on 7, you might want to at least dual boot 10 for software testing to catch issues with your software that aren't present on 7. Microsoft dropped official support for 7 a while back as well so you're going to start seeing a larger and larger disconnect between your development environment and your users. You don't want to find yourself in a situation in the future where you're suddenly forced to debug a Windows 10 issue and you run into a slew of other unpredicted development issues with a last minute Windows 10 upgrade. I know this because I've been there...