Moving to Vista

Posted on September 8, 2007

My desktop PC’s power supply blew up (literally) a few days ago. The family was unwilling to wait for the RMA process, so this gave a good excuse to upgrade (which, of course, I’ve been itching to do anyway).

Of course, the new machine came with Vista, which actually runs fairly well (the quad-core 2.4 GHz processor may have something to do with that… or it could be the 3 GB of RAM or the SATA RAID hard disks…). I put the drive from the old system in and started moving things over, but I ran into problems trying to delete some old directory trees (particularly the old Cygwin install) due to permission problems.

A bit of poking around on Google led to a useful tip on Tim Sneath’s MSDN blog: Windows Vista Secret #11: Deleting the Undeletable. The short version is:

    takeown /f directory /r /d y
    icacls directory /grant administrators:F /T

Works like a charm. Just use a command prompt with administrator privileges.

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