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In Windows 7 Professional, is it safe, within the Advanced Security Settings of the C drive, to set the "Current owner" to "Administrators ([Name]-PC\Administrators)" of the whole drive including "subcontainers and objects"?

While I did get Access Denied messages for some objects during the process (especially ones pertaining to Avast Anti-virus and System from what I recall), I attempted the above change in the Advanced Security Settings as a result of trying to perform a "netstat -b" command in the command prompt window and getting the message "The requested operation requires elevation." Only after I made the above change in the Advanced Security Settings did I realize I just needed to run the command prompt as administrator to perform the "netstat -b" command.

Now that I made the change however I'm concerned if it's relatively safe (I'm the sole user, and I don't personally go messing with program files in Windows Explorer I didn't create myself). The "Current owner" of the C drive previously said "TrustedInstaller" or something like that and I don't see a way to change it back to this.

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No, it isn't "safe".

What you have done is allowed for any process executed under your username to have unquestioned access to all the files that command worked on. Before, UAC would have at least prompted (assuming you had that on) for user action before continuing since they were owned by the system (even though you had access as an admin). Now, they are as if they are your files, so the process can do nearly whatever they want with them.

The easiest fix is to backup your user data and re-install. There are supposed tools that fix perms, but I think that is a long-shot.

There is absolutely no reason to ever claim ownership of a set of system files (except for extremely far edge cases). If a guide is telling you to take ownership of a bunch of system folders/files - it's not a very good guide. It should at least say "don't ever use this in production/consumer use".

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  • There was no guide that made that recommendation. I needed to perform the "netstat -b" command at the command prompt as part of the troubleshooting I was trying to do for having an uncharacteristically very slow internet connection. I realized on my own that the security change "might be bad" only after I did it. But since I wasn't completely sure I asked the question in case I didn't have to worry.
    – Elise Dana
    Dec 6, 2013 at 19:14
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Leave ownership of the local disk alone. I don't understand why people are so adamant about messing with these things all the time. They're set this way for a reason, you don't need to do this and run the risk of hosing the system and locking yourself out of your files down the road. I used to work with this guy that was hell-bent on doing this and all he ever did was mess them up, I was constantly having to re-image workstations.

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  • Personally I'm not adamant about messing with things. My internet connection was being way too slow and a credible source was suggesting to perform a "netstat -b" command to check if anything looks suspicious. I could do a "netstat -a" command and for no obvious reason I could not do a "netstat -b" command.... Windows is also set to try to make me save everything in "My Documents" or whatever and the reason must be that it's assumed I'm stupid and don't know what a hard drive is in the first place to navigate it. So, things "set this way or that" are not always for very good reasons.
    – Elise Dana
    Dec 6, 2013 at 19:13

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