So far besides the file access authority, things are going OK.
Today I installed CS3 and have run into a snag.
Whenever I try to run CS3 from the desktop or from within programs: it starts to launch and then just as it would normally open, I get this error message, in CS3,
"could not intialize photoshop because the file is locked use the properties command in the windows explorer to unlock the file"
Does anyone know where this command is inside of explorer? I have looked closely and can't find anything like this.
The only way I can run the program is to right click and select "run as administrator" This allows me to use the program with no problems. But I would prefer to get around this issue. Also when the program runs this way, it brings up the box stating that this application is not trusted, and do I want to still run it, 3rd option. Once selected, CS3 runs fine.
I have yet to try to uninstall and reinstall the code.
It's probably a permissions thing, try this: (I'm pretty sure you'll have to be logged in on an Admin account to do this)
Right-click on your CS3 shortcut, choose Properties and go to the Security tab. In the box at the top, select the user account you'll be running in and see if all permissions are checked. If they're not, just click on the Edit button and check them all.
Here's a typical screenshot:
HTH,
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
The Vista User Account Control system is for the birds. Fortunately it can be shut off. I have done so and it makes Vista behave a lot more reasonably if your account is an Administrator account.
UAC tries to run everything with "normal" privileges - not administrator. It also tries to secretly put things that would normally go in folders considered "privileged" in other places. Frankly it's a major pain in the rear, especially for developers who would like to write code that runs well with it. I still keep a virtual machine for developing such code; believe me writing an installer to work without a UAC prompt is no small feat.
I don't know when Adobe was developing CS3, but I suspect they weren't as aware of what Vista was going to be doing as they were later, so it's possible CS3 is trying to read or write a file to a "privileged" area. Your workaround to "Run as Administrator" is pretty much right on, assuming you don't prefer to disable UAC entirely.
FYI, I can start Photoshop CS3 (indeed, all the way back to Photoshop 6.0) without any problems on Vista - with UAC disabled.
It was my scratch drives that was causing the problem. They are on a scsi card, which I installed after the main install. They needed to have the permissions changed to everyone.
I totally agree on UAC, amazing mistake. Not sure what they were trying to do.
Noel, how do you disable the UAC? I figured how to create the true administrator account and can log off and and log back on as the administrator, but my main account is under users/paul Caldwell and it has alot of permission problems. You can't open alot of the folders you could in XP. I am assuming by turning off UAC, this might go away.
I totally agree on UAC, amazing mistake. Not sure what they were trying to do.
The vast majority of security issues that Windows has had over the last few years have generally been related to the fact that software generally expects to have the run of the system. The first versions of Windows were designed for single user, non-networked computers and ran on the simple principle of providing you with access to everything unless something is explicitly restricted. On UNIX and BSD-based platforms like OS X and Linux, on the other hand, the assumption is generally that you don't have access to anything unless explicitly granted (although this position has been moderated lately).
Naturally, Microsoft has moved more towards the latter in order to make their system more secure. The problem, however, is that software often assumes that the former is still true so they can't just make the change unilaterally. They attempted to add a limited user account back in Windows 2000, however developers simply ignored development guidelines and told their users to run as administrator. As such, limited user accounts were largely unusable and the vast majority of users run as full administrators (which from a security standpoint is about the worst thing you can do). Over the last few years, they've been trying more and more to nudge developers to work within a proper structure but have only had limited success.
Most developers tend to be of the if-it-aint-broke-don't-fix-it variety, so it became obvious that the only way to force the changes that were necessary was to begin enforcing the guidelines that they've been trying to push. UAC was designed as a mechanism to do this - software that was behaving badly would now generate an annoying error message each time it started. As such, the concept was that developers would have little choice but to address the issues that trigger it. The idea was that these developers would test their products during Vista's beta period, see these problems and fix them so that users wouldn't see them.
The problem, however, is that developers continued to ignore the warnings during the beta period and only ran into pushback when Vista was released to the public. Developers have been forced to make the changes at this point, although a lot of the blame for these issues gets incorrectly focused on Microsoft. Things are getting better at this point, and it is beginning to become much more practical to run as a limited user on Vista (at least with contemporary software) but it was a rough road getting to this point.
The catch-22 in this situation is that UAC effectively had to be annoying to achieve the ends that were required. Regardless of how secure the OS itself is made, if every program that the user is running has unrestricted access to the system any security flaw in any one of those programs will compromise it. Unfortunately, when this does happen Microsoft tends to catch the flak from it regardless of who's fault it is so it was important for them to address the issue. In order to restrict access in such a way as to mitigate those problems, software running on the platform needs to be written in such a way as to understand those restrictions. Microsoft tried to do it the easy way first (provide guidelines, depreciate old API functions, etc.), but as developers didn't cooperate they had little choice but to force the matter.
With that said, UAC is certainly not a perfect implementation of an escalation system. Primarily, documentation on how exactly it works is relatively limited so it's not always easy to figure out exactly what is triggering it. Further, some programs legitimately need access to low-level system functions and there isn't really an elegant way to handle these scenarios. Regardless, while people may dislike UAC it is having the desired effect - software is following security guidelines a lot better nowadays, and it is actually becoming practical to run a Vista machine with a limited user account. Had Vista not had UAC, these changes would likely not be occurring and future versions of Windows would be hamstrung by the same fundamental security issues as it's predecessors.
Quote:
Noel, how do you disable the UAC? I figured how to create the true administrator account and can log off and and log back on as the administrator, but my main account is under users/paul Caldwell and it has alot of permission problems. You can't open alot of the folders you could in XP. I am assuming by turning off UAC, this might go away.
To disable UAC, perform the following steps:
Go to Start-Control Panel.
In the search box (top right corner), enter 'uac'.
Click the Turn User Account Control (UAC) on or off.
UNcheck the 'Use User Account Control (UAC) to help protect your computer' checkbox and click OK.
When prompted, restart your computer and UAC will be disabled.
If you ever want to turn it back on, simply reverse the change in step 4.
I agree on your points, and fully understand. Microsoft probably needed this for the average user, however I still would have liked to have the easy option to turn it off.
What is more interesting is that now I found a link from Adobe, on how to turn on the GPU for Xp 64 bit.
I agree on your points, and fully understand. Microsoft probably needed this for the average user, however I still would have liked to have the easy option to turn it off.
The problem is that if they made it easy to turn off, then we'd just end up in the same scenario as we were with the limited user accounts. Developers would simply instruct users to turn off UAC (as they told users to run as administrator with Win2K and XP) rather than fix the problems, and we wouldn't get anywhere. As it stands, the option to disable it is there for advanced users, however it is buried deep enough that reputable software vendors won't try to tell basic users to do so willy nilly.
From a security standpoint, running your everyday work environment in a limited user account is an extremely good idea regardless of your skill level. Disciplined computer use will block 99.9% of problems that the general population will fall victim to, but there is always the possibility of a zero-day exploit in one of the software packages you are using and this is really the only way to mitigate the damage that these types of attacks can perform. Allowing every piece of software you run unfettered access to everything on your computer is a fundamental security flaw regardless of platform and the level of experience that the user has
There is a reason that UNIX platforms have strongly discouraged the use of root accounts except when absolutely necessary, but for all intents and purposes Windows users have been doing just that for years. I have used limited accounts for normal work on all of my UNIX/BSD/OS X machines for years, and I do the same within Vista, but it is nearly impossible to do with Windows XP and earlier. As annoying as UAC can be, it's presence is the only thing that has made that behaviour feasible on a desktop environment.
The key thing to remember here is that UAC in it's current form wasn't so much intended to directly secure the platform, but instead trigger certain changes in the ecosystem to build the foundations necessary for it. The security of a platform is a multi-faceted animal, and it is only as strong as it's weakest link. With Vista, the underlying kernel is one of the most secure out there at this point. The problem, however, is that certain fundamental flaws (eg insecure client software running with full superuser rights) allow hackers to make an end run around those protections. In recent years, the vast majority of exploits have moved away from attacks on the OS itself to peripheral software (web browsers, email clients, file sharing programs, etc.) that have no need to access the underlying system. It is unfortunate that users had to get pinned down in the middle of this conflict, but I'm not entirely sure how else this would have gotten done.
With that said, Windows 7 dials back the aggressiveness of UAC significantly, largely because Vista achieved that first objective (ie force developers to write better behaving code). Vista has a large enough installed base that software vendors can't simply ignore security guidelines anymore, so future iterations can be less aggressive and still maintain the desired level of security. As new software will likely be built the way that their guidelines suggest it should, future versions of Windows can be built around a more secure foundation. The road that got us to this point is certainly not ideal, but regardless of the bumps along the way we are much closer to where we need to be than we were in the past.
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