[Frederick anything unique]

I kept a copy of my "Contacts" file from an old version of Palm Desktop which ran on an XP OS. I had planned to copy it into a new installation of Palm Desktop on my brand-new Vista machine. My old machine is physically gone.

I receive no error messages when I try to copy my file over the existing one (after the install and after clearing a "Read Only" protection on this file and folder) and it appears to be spending time on copying, completing with no error message. However, when I relook at the folder contents (using Windows Explorer) I find the old file still there and the "Read Only" switch still set!!

I have confirmed that I have Administrator priviledges. I had believed that I was of intermediate expertise on older operating systems - comfortable in doing most normal changes.

Is there some high-level controls on the Program Files folder in the C (root) drive that I am unaware of? What is new in Vista that would give me these fits?

Thanks in advance for help on this!

Fred

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Hello Fred, welcome to Geeks to Go!

Read-only flags really don't mean all that much anymore:

NTFS permissions can be changed using the Security tab (assuming you have it on your edition of Vista and that Simple File Sharing is disabled). Alternatively you can use a command line tool such as cacls.exe to alter permissions.

The state of the read only flag on a folder is meaningless, it exists only to allow you to reset the state of all files in the current directory (or subdirectories) if you so choose. Files that are marked as Read Only might be treated as read only by some applications but there is no real guarantee of that (notice that Explorer will quite happily let you delete them). Generally speaking there is little point changing it.

Ax

[Ax238]

Hello Fred, welcome to Geeks to Go!

Read-only flags really don't mean all that much anymore:

NTFS permissions can be changed using the Security tab (assuming you have it on your edition of Vista and that Simple File Sharing is disabled). Alternatively you can use a command line tool such as cacls.exe to alter permissions.

The state of the read only flag on a folder is meaningless, it exists only to allow you to reset the state of all files in the current directory (or subdirectories) if you so choose. Files that are marked as Read Only might be treated as read only by some applications but there is no real guarantee of that (notice that Explorer will quite happily let you delete them). Generally speaking there is little point changing it.

Ax