Over the last two years I’ve slowly started moving away from Microsoft products. I had already stopped using packages like Office for personal use, and was only using Windows for work (because I was forced to). Life without Microsoft (or less of it) was awesome! But when Windows 7 came out, people started praising it a lot. I didn’t hear one bad thing about it. So when my wife started using Windows 7 yesterday, I kept a keen eye on it. And up until about 2 hours ago, I was thoroughly impressed. It seemed they had added so many really practical usability features, and it looked very fast and responsive. And then the skeleton fell out of the root directory.
But before I explain what happened, imagine, for a moment, the following scenario. It is the year 2045. You have just purchased a brand new car. You’re excited, and can’t wait to start cruising around. But when you get into the car, and try to start it, the car says, “Access denied. You do not have the appropriate permission to start this car.” You try anything and everything to get it started, but it just won’t. Then you phone a car mechanic, and he comes over to help out. He tells you, “Yeah, this is a feature of the car. It won’t allow you start the car, because it considers you a risk. You know, you might crash the car. But I’ve changed the settings, and you can now start it.” You get into your car, glad to finally be able to use it. You reach the open road, but discover you can’t turn into streets that aren’t on the car’s navigation system. And quite a few of them haven’t been loaded onto the system, it turns out. So you drive your car back to the dealership, and they tell you the same thing about the driver being a risk. And they also insist that this is a feature that will protect you. How nice of the car manufacturers.
So the actual problem we had with Windows 7 was file access permissions. My wife plugged in her external drive that she uses for storing some of her documents. Everything seemed fine. Until she tried to edit one of the documents. It told her she didn’t have the correct permissions. But the file properties said she was the owner of the file, and her user had full control. We searched high and low for solutions to this. One solution seemed viable, and after following the instructions, the drive was suddenly no longer accessible at all. “Access denied” was all Windows 7 would tell us. How nice. Eventually we got it working again, but what a mission! We had to connect it to a Windows XP machine, change ownership of the drive, then assign full control to all users, and then try again in Windows 7. But even then, there were still some files where we needed to add more permissions to be able to edit them.
To me this is just not logical at all. You’re logged in as an administrator, you own all the files, yet you can’t even edit a simple text file. “Excuse me, but I don’t trust you, an administrator, enough to edit a simple text file. I’m afraid you might mess it up. So I won’t allow it,” Windows 7 says. What a turkey! Go jump off a bridge, Microsoft!