I'm going to do a clean reinstall of a friend's laptop which has XP Home on it and is in a nearly unusable state (8 minutes just to boot ). Logging in took even longer and since I only need to backup his files to my desktop, I installed XP Pro in a separate folder so that I can backup. But there are some folders which are owned by his old username (in XP Home) that I can't even open or copy. I looked in properties and to my surprise, there is absolutely nothing which allows me to change ownership or permission. What happened to all that functionality that we all enjoyed in NT and 2000???

Anyway, I don't Microsoft is that stupid to remove this function so it's probably hidden somewhere. Does anyone know how I can change the ownership of these folders?

In the properties, go to the Security tab and click Advanced near the bottom. You should then see an Owner tab in the new dialog box that pops up.

hmm... I don't see a Security tab in properties. Only General, Sharing, and Customize.

Oh yeah, then you have to go to Tools->Folder Options and under the View tab uncheck "Use simple file sharing (Recommended)".

Control Panel -> folder options -> view -> disable 'use simple file sharing' (or similar, I'm not using an english version)

edit: someone was faster

Ah, I got it.

Now these file sharing and security tabs are starting to look more like win2k. I wonder why Microsoft chose to hide these options in XP Pro. It makes sense to do it in XP Home but in the Pro version as well??

Anyway, thanks for the help