I encountered a vexing problem right about the time I got my Nokia 5310. My Thinkpad T60 won’t write to the phone when connected as a storage device. I thought it was a phone problem and I asked Nokia Support for help but as expected, they weren’t really able to help. Meanwhile, I was stuck using Bluetooth to transfer files. No fun. Later, I noticed that my external hard drives, card readers, and generally USB storage devices don’t work either. I tried searching for a solution and eventually I found it. You just need to use the registry editor to delete the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies\WriteProtect. Voila! I can now write to USB storage devices. How that key got into my system registry, I don’t know. Another one of the many wonders of Windows.
Why I Hate Windows No. 35706
I get to the office expecting to see the output of a program we left running on my laptop through the weekend only to find out that that Windows Automatic (but stupid) Update has initiated a reboot. Argh!
SetACL: Deliverance From Windows ACL Hell
We were wrestling with a weird problem in Windows the whole day. We were trying to transfer access rights to files from one user to another but we keep ending up with some directories that still can’t be accessed by the new user. We were stumped for quite some time before we found out that some directories can prevent inheriting access rights from its parents via an option that disables inheritance!!! How this came about we still can’t don’t know. But because of this option, the built-in ACL manager of Windows can’t completely assign access rights to all subdirectories. Neither can other Microsoft utilities like CACL (Change Access Control Lists) or XCACLS (eXtended CACL). There is definitely no way you can go from affected directory to affected directory removing that option. Thankfully there’s SetACL. Among its features: Reset permissions on all sub-objects and enable propagation of inherited permissions. Open source rocks!