UAC Deactivated

I'm sorry Microsoft. I had to do it. I just joined the growing ranks of developers out there who deactivated UAC on Vista.

I gave it a try. I really did! I didn't even mind answering all of the "Are you sure?" prompts whenever I tried to do anything (it's really not as bad as what that "Hi, I'm a PC... and I'm a Mac" commercial makes it out to be).

The final straw for me was the inability to work with files on my hard drive unless they were in certain directories (folders). For whatever reason, when I copied my "C:\Dev" directory structure from a backup onto my hard drive, I couldn't edit any of the files. As a developer, this is a pretty bad thing to have happen.

Even a simple change to an XML file using Notepad would not overwrite the existing file. I tinkered around for 30 minutes trying to get this one task to work, playing with things like changing the NTFS owner of the file and directory tree. No luck.

Alas, the need for productivity superceded the security benefits. Deactivating UAC allowed me to overwrite files in my source directory.

And now, back to work!