I love Windows 7, but hate doing web development on it.

[ripcurlksm]

Ive been running Windows 7 for 10 months now maybe and I love it... Except I hate to do my web dev work on it due to admin permissions/file permissions.

Yes I am an administrator on the computer.

At first, I could not save any .php, .txt, .html, etc., etc. file unless I opened that program by right-clicking and 'Run As Administrator'. Doing this let me actually edit and save files w/o getting a 'dont have sufficient permissions' warning. So to fix this, I make a shortcut/macro to open Notepad, PHPDesigner, Dreamweaver and SmartFTP as Administrator. I now use these shortcuts to launch these programs. Now that its setup, not really an issue.

But it has been painful working since the above fix due to other permission issues. Essentially, drag and drop is shot when trying to open a file from a windowed folder and directly into Notepad/PHPDesigner/Dreamweaver/SmartFTP. If I try to drag-and-drop any .php/.html/etc. file from my project folder on my desktop to edit it in PHPDesigner, it wont let me open it. I have to go to the file menu File>Open, and navigate to the directory to open it. I cant drag and drop into FTP as well.

Yes I am an administrator on the computer.

This might seem trivial but this has really annoyed me to no end. Take away drag-and-drop and your experience changes dramatically.

Any ideas?

[Fou-Lu]

Server 2008 is just as bad as this.
To me, its the stupidest thing I've ever seen. I'm not logged in as the Administrator because I want to get prompted to allow everything; no I'm here because I need to get things done and can't be constantly asked for approval.
In fact, today I tried saving a file into a shared directory via CLI after running some tests. Can't remember quite what the error was, but essentially it said I wasn't privileged enough to write to it. I'm like 'wtfbbq, who explicitly denied the administrator?!'. Nope, security said I would be fine. Yeah you betcha, forgot that this was a 2008 server so I needed to execute runas in order to do it. Is this M$ attempt to fix their problems?
Fortunately, the UAC can be controlled and disabled in Server 2008 (not sure about Windows 7, but I'd expect so).
I wouldn't be logged in as the administrator if I didn't want to do administrative things. Even my home user is nothing more than a user; I have a separate administrative account if I desire to perform maintenance tasks.

[Apostropartheid]

That's weird. On Vista, I don't have to run any of my web tools as administrator apart from Apache and MySQL, which is fairly understandable. Try lowering the level of UAC, though I would not recommend totally removing it.

[oracleguy]

I am on Windows 7 and do not have that issue. Is the UAC set to max or something? I am just using the standard install of the professional edition. I do web development and software development on it.

[brad211987]

There are also settings in the group policy editor to automatically elevate your privileges which will allow you to avoid much of those type of issues. Of course there is a security concern with doing this, simply because it circumvents the entire concept of the UAC.