Cannot access USB stick data

[Jason]

My wife is taking a Photoshop class. She has PS installed on, believe it
or not, a netbook (Asus)! It seems to work fine - I was surprised.

The first class was today. The instructor brought materials on a usb
stick. When she tried to load the files on my wife's machine a message
popped up saying access to the files was denied (her account has admin
privileges). It offered to let her gain access (another popup) but when
she tried it refused again. I'm sorry that I don't have the precise
messages - she didn't note them. Where should I look? Some googling gets
me close but the problem descriptions don't seem to describe what my wife
saw.

The system is Win 7 Starter (never heard of that!).

TIA

 

[Ken1943]

My wife is taking a Photoshop class. She has PS installed on, believe it
or not, a netbook (Asus)! It seems to work fine - I was surprised.

The first class was today. The instructor brought materials on a usb
stick. When she tried to load the files on my wife's machine a message
popped up saying access to the files was denied (her account has admin
privileges). It offered to let her gain access (another popup) but when
she tried it refused again. I'm sorry that I don't have the precise
messages - she didn't note them. Where should I look? Some googling gets
me close but the problem descriptions don't seem to describe what my wife
saw.

The system is Win 7 Starter (never heard of that!).

TIA

I first would look at your antivirus program for permissions.


KenW

 

[Gene E. Bloch]

My wife is taking a Photoshop class. She has PS installed on, believe it
or not, a netbook (Asus)! It seems to work fine - I was surprised.

The first class was today. The instructor brought materials on a usb
stick. When she tried to load the files on my wife's machine a message
popped up saying access to the files was denied (her account has admin
privileges). It offered to let her gain access (another popup) but when
she tried it refused again. I'm sorry that I don't have the precise
messages - she didn't note them. Where should I look? Some googling gets
me close but the problem descriptions don't seem to describe what my wife
saw.

The system is Win 7 Starter (never heard of that!).

TIA

Netbooks usually come with the starter edition.

I believe that even on a netbook, you can log in as the Administrator
(not *an* administrator).

First, open a command window as Administrator, and execute this command:
net user Administrator /active:yes

Now you can Switch User to *the* Administrator. Do that and try again to
get the stuff off of the thumb drive.

When you're finished, switch back to the regular user and execute this
command in a command window:
net user Administrator /active:no
to disable the Admin logon.

I just thought of a possibly easier approach (if it works): copy the
data into a convenient folder on another computer (if you can access the
thumb drive there). Now either copy it over the network to the netbook,
or copy it to another thumb drive and try that on the netbook.

Another alternative: tell the instructor that he or she messed up
(especially if others in the class had that problem).

A fourth alternative: in case I'm wrong, just wait until someone else
has a better suggestion here

 

[Ken1943]

This net book came with starter. First thing I did was Anytime Upgrade to
Home Premium.


KenW

 

[Gene E. Bloch]

This net book came with starter. First thing I did was Anytime Upgrade to
Home Premium.

KenW

As I said, "Netbooks usually come with the starter edition".

Anyway, on my (now rarely used) netbook, I just kept the Starter
edition; to me, it didn't seem important to upgrade. It did what I
wanted (which wasn't much) and it was adequate for that. I did consider
it, but I reserved the decision for a while, and that ended up being
long enough to decide not to upgrade.

 

[Jason]

I first would look at your antivirus program for permissions.


KenW

Good suggestion. The netbook came with an AV program with which I am not
familiar. Thanks.

 

[Ken1943]

I use Agnitum Outpost Security Suite. One option is to block everything
on a usb stick.

Good suggestion. The netbook came with an AV program with which I am not
familiar. Thanks.

KenW

 

[John Williamson]

My wife is taking a Photoshop class. She has PS installed on, believe it
or not, a netbook (Asus)! It seems to work fine - I was surprised.

The first class was today. The instructor brought materials on a usb
stick. When she tried to load the files on my wife's machine a message
popped up saying access to the files was denied (her account has admin
privileges). It offered to let her gain access (another popup) but when
she tried it refused again. I'm sorry that I don't have the precise
messages - she didn't note them. Where should I look? Some googling gets
me close but the problem descriptions don't seem to describe what my wife
saw.

The system is Win 7 Starter (never heard of that!).

It won't be causing the problem you mention, but Starter edition is only
there to sell you the better versions. In particular, if you network
with other computers, I'd recommend using the anytime upgrade option to
buy Home Premium, for what it costs.

I'd agree that you need to check that your AV program isn't blocking
access to the USB ports.

 

[J. P. Gilliver (John)]

I appreciate the problem as you weren't there, but I think we need to
know a little more: could it not see the USB stick? See it but not
access it? Or see and access it, but not run an executable from it? If
the last, then presumably it would (if there's space) be worth making a
temporary folder on the hard drive and seeing if it would run from
there. If it can't see the stick at all, we need to know if it can see
other sticks. (If that's the case, must be something about the
instructor's stick - at a guess, either too big for the netbook to
handle [is that likely?], some filing system anomaly [I suspect that
_isn't_ likely] such as a FATxx/NTFS funny, or it is set to autorun and
the AV is blocking _that_.)

It won't be causing the problem you mention, but Starter edition is
only there to sell you the better versions. In particular, if you
network with other computers, I'd recommend using the anytime upgrade
option to buy Home Premium, for what it costs.

I've never played with Starter edition (I understand you can't change
the wallpaper on it). My understanding is that it is less demanding of
hardware resources, and I think I even heard claims in the early days of
7 that it ran better on the same (limited) hardware than XP did; I was
never able to check that. Certainly some netbooks still came with it
even though they only had 1G of RAM, which from what I've read here
no-one in their right mind would try to run other variants of 7 on.

(I feel netbooks are much maligned too, though as I say I haven't tried
7 on one; this [XP, 12"] one is my main computer, and does nearly all I
want [bit slow on rendering video, but then I do very little of that].)

 

[Jason]

On Sat, 23 Mar 2013 08:33:50 +0000 "J. P. Gilliver (John)"

I appreciate the problem as you weren't there, but I think we need to
know a little more: could it not see the USB stick? See it but not
access it? Or see and access it, but not run an executable from it? If
the last, then presumably it would (if there's space) be worth making a
temporary folder on the hard drive and seeing if it would run from
there. If it can't see the stick at all, we need to know if it can see
other sticks. (If that's the case, must be something about the
instructor's stick - at a guess, either too big for the netbook to
handle [is that likely?], some filing system anomaly [I suspect that
_isn't_ likely] such as a FATxx/NTFS funny, or it is set to autorun and
the AV is blocking _that_.)

I need to know more too! The stick certainly recognized - Windows was
apparently complaining about the owner of the files on it being unknown
(which would be true). No issues with executables - the contents are
Photoshop .psd image files.

Every USB stick I tried worked fine. My wife's friend brought one over
with the .psd files and I copied them without any trouble. I have to
think there was something peculiar about the instructor's. (Without
seeing what happened I can only speculate, but I wonder if the
instructor's USB gadget was trying to install some kind of management
software. I've seen some that come with some utility, and many USB disk
drives want to install monitoring utilities. It can be difficult to
throttle them... )

It won't be causing the problem you mention, but Starter edition is
only there to sell you the better versions. In particular, if you
network with other computers, I'd recommend using the anytime upgrade
option to buy Home Premium, for what it costs.

I've never played with Starter edition (I understand you can't change
the wallpaper on it). My understanding is that it is less demanding of
hardware resources, and I think I even heard claims in the early days of
7 that it ran better on the same (limited) hardware than XP did; I was
never able to check that. Certainly some netbooks still came with it
even though they only had 1G of RAM, which from what I've read here
no-one in their right mind would try to run other variants of 7 on.

(I feel netbooks are much maligned too, though as I say I haven't tried
7 on one; this [XP, 12"] one is my main computer, and does nearly all I
want [bit slow on rendering video, but then I do very little of that].)

I'd agree that you need to check that your AV program isn't blocking
access to the USB ports.