Have you ever been working in Partbuilder and tried to save a part that you had been working on only to get a message telling you that the file was read only? I’ve seen this case twice – the second time was with one of our partners – Robert Rien of Kelar Pacific.
This issue seems to happen only with Windows 7 x64 – during the first case I had regarding this issue I went in and compared almost every operating system setting that we could think of, and everything (including permissions) were set exactly the same – or so I thought. There was something that was different, and Robert pointed it out to me. To see how easy this one is to fix, follow the jump.
Now, even though we were both local administrators on our respective machines, we found that one thing can affect administrative rights – UAC.
UAC was introduced with Windows Vista to allow for much tighter system security. This little feature alerts you to any instance where something is trying to change your system. For Vista users, we always suggest turning off UAC, since it is more of an annoyance than anything.
Windows 7 brings a new default mode to UAC – Admin Approval Mode. This mode requires administrators to approve functions that were allowed in Windows XP with a prompt. Since I am often making very deep system changes and checks in the troubleshooting process, I keep that mode turned off to keep from being constantly bombarded by “are you sure?” messages. Because of this, I can save anything anywhere, which was why I couldn’t reproduce the initial error.
Let’s take a look at this setting – in Windows 7, go to Control Panel and select User Accounts. The resulting window will have an option to Change User Account Control settings, as seen below.
When you select Change User Account Control settings, you will be presented with a window that contains a slider. By default, it will look like this:
What you will want to do is grab that slider and drag it all the way to the bottom:
Windows tries to tell you that this is not a recommended setting, but I’m telling you different. If you want to save your parts in Partbuilder, this is definitely recommended. Now select OK and reboot your machine just to be safe. This should allow you to save your parts in Partbuilder.
Again – special thanks goes to Robert Rien with Kelar Pacific for his discovery. Anytime my customers help me to learn something that will help others, I always give them credit. Thanks Robert!
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