Windows 10 constantly asks for Administrator permissions, but I AM THE ADMINISTRATOR?!?!?!?!?

Hello. I’ve just done a reinstall of Windows 10, after downloading the most recent version (I assume) onto a USB, and have come up against something incredibly irritating. Any answers much appreciated.

I am thus far the sole administrator and sole user on the system, and yet I’m forced to specify that I want to run certain programs (for example a small program for batch-renaming of files) as administrator because they don’t work otherwise. This wasn’t the case with previous installs of Win 10. Even more annoying, but I suppose it’s probably caused by the same thing as what’s getting in the way of the file renamer program - WHENEVER I want to move, rename or delete ANY file or folder, I get a stupid pop-up saying that I need to have administrator permissions. It’s not very clever, because I then press Enter and the process goes ahead anyway! I suppose that I should have stopped a long time ago being amazed by Microsoft’s ability to come up with new ways to annoy me, but this one is right up there.

Anyway, I’ve searched for solutions, seen something about User Account Controls. I changed the setting there to “Never challenge” or whatever it was, rebooted, and that made no difference. Also, there’s some stuff about changing ownership of files, but I can’t see anything on my settings suggesting that the Administrator doesn’t have full control over things. I don’t have the energy to follow everything these articles say, because I have very little confidence that they will lead anywhere. You know - the will to live, instead of trying to understand Windows…

Apart from this confirming my determination to get fully comfortable and self-sufficient on Linux, and me shouting “WTF!” a million times to the walls and ceiling, does anyone here know what on earth is going on there???

Thanks very much :slight_smile:

I’m just assuming here because you didn’t mention it, that the files and apps you previously used were on another drive? If so, then as far as Windows is concerned, the permissions don’t match and wants to elevate to administrative privileges. You would need to change the owner of the files to your user account to prevent UAC from popping up all the time.

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Yes, of course they were all on partitions that existed beforehand over many years and reinstalls, but like I said, this has never happened before. Well, let’s have another look…

Fair enough, that seems to have sorted it. Still, I don’t understand why this has happened only now :~/

A new install, a new user, a new user GUID. It doesn’t match the permissions of the other older drives.

It’s like if you did a Linux installation and the new distro gave you user ID 500 instead of 1000.

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any exe running on the boot partition will have to ask admin permission before it can write to the drive.
if you put your apps on say d:
you wouldn’t have to give permissions to the same apps unless its going to write to c: at some point.

i think you can lower the uac controls but its not recommended, it should get rid of most of the asks.
but again not the best idea.

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[I AM THE ADMIN!?]

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This ^

You shouldn’t disable UAC. Just go to the file properties → security (I think) and change ownership to either your user or if you don’t mind, to everyone group (since you’re the only user and use an admin account, which goes against the “principle of least privilege,” it shouldn’t make any difference if it’s everyone or just you). At least the UAC prompt will block (or so does MS say) malware from self-escalating its own privilege.

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In this case its working as designed. Since you’re moving files that belong to another user (potentially unknown user if you’ve reinstalled windows) then Windows is asking for elevated permissions to move files you don’t have the right to move.

This is exactly how Linux does it as well. The difference you’re seeing in the prompt is because your ‘administrator’ account isn’t necessarily running with admin privileges at all times. By default administrator users should be running with normal privileges, and when they require admin privileges windows will prompt for permissions to continue the admin action.

Its somewhat the quivilant of an ‘admin’ user on linux, who’s a normal user, but has sudo to run admin actions.

do not disable or lower UAC controls. Instead properly change the ownership of the files to your actual user.

The reason you might not have seen it before depends if you’ve reinstalled before and pulled the same files with unknown ownership. It also depends on what controls have changed in windows. Microsoft have slowly improved security defaults over various releases of Windows 10.

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