The other day, a friend of mine installed some software on his Vista notebook. The software was incompatible with Vista so he went to uninstall it so that he can install the newer version that is compatible. The incompatible software somehow got corrupted so it wouldn’t uninstall using your regular automated uninstall method. After trying a few times, we decided to just manually delete the program and fish through the registry and remove all of the entries.

When we went to delete the application folder, we couldn’t. "You don’t have permission to delete this folder" is what we were told. We turned off UAC, messed around with the permissions and we were never able to delete the folder.

Certain folders in Vista is protected and only the administrator can do certain things with those folders. To delete those files and folders, what you would need to do is log into Vista as the administrator, not just an account that is labeled as an admin account. If you are like me, you probably have one login to your PC, and that login  has admin privileges. Since you are logged into your account that has admin privileges, you should beable to delete any file right? Well what a lot of people don’t know is that even though you have admin privileges,  you are not logged into Vista as an administrator, There is a difference. In Vista, the actual administrator login is hidden.

Un-hide your Vista administrator login

This is a weird way to have to do something in Vista, but to un-hide your administrator login, you need to go into the command prompt. Easiest way to do this is hit start and type "cmd" in the start search bar. run cmd once Vista finds it and type this command

net user administrator /active:yes

Log-In-As-Administrator-In-Vista

Hit enter and your administrator account is now enabled. Reboot your PC and you will now have the option to log into that account. Once you are logged into your administrator account, you should beable to delete, modify, change and whatever you want to any file or folder you want. Its not a good idea to keep this account active so once you finished doing what you need to do, you should go back to the command prompt and disable it. You do it the same as above but type this in instead

net user administrator /active:no

Hit enter and the administrator account will go back to being hidden.