Take and Grant Full Control Permissions and Ownership in Windows 7 or Vista Right Click Menu
In order to ensure greater security and reliability of Windows operating systems such as Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2, a lot of system files have been assigned and granted ownership and full control permissions to TrustedInstaller and has special restricted permissions to all other users, including administrators. While the design makes accidental deletion or change to system files, it makes job of technical users harder though.
Manually take ownership and grant full control permissions of the files (including executables) and folders to administrators or other users or groups are messy multiple steps process in Windows. There are multiple ways to make grant full control permissions and ownership to administrators easier, such as using Take Control Of command script or manually issue takeown and icacls commands in Command Prompt window. It’s also possible to add a right click menu item to contextual menu that appears when user right clicks on files and folders, that automatically take full control and ownership of the selected files or folders as administrators.

In order to add a “Grant Admin Full Control” command to Windows right click menu, just download the following registry registration entries file, and double click on the GrantAdminFullControl.reg to merge new registry keys and values to system. The registry entries have been updated from previous version. It works on both 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x64) OS and is non-recursive.
Download GrantAdminFullControl.reg
Tip: It’s possible to change “Grant Admin Full Control” to any name you like if it’s not to your liking. To change the name on the right click menu, just edit the .reg file, and replace the three Grant Admin Full Control string in the text file to your prefer name, such as Take Full Control Permissions, Grant Administrators Full Permissions, Give Administrators Full Control, Grant Administrator Rights and etc.
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November 3rd, 2009 16:15
how do u uninstall this cause it doesnt work for me
November 3rd, 2009 16:10
i hope this works
November 2nd, 2009 13:12
[...] Re: Windows 7 file Copy dl and run this reg file. And the rightclick> full control Take and Grant Full Control Permissions and Ownership in Windows 7 or Vista Right Click Menu My Digi… [...]
October 24th, 2009 05:07
This protect yourself from yourself protection is bull. It wouldn’t allow me to instal a windows certified driver.
I ran grant admin full control on the windows directory and still don’t have permission to update windows.
Any ideas?
October 23rd, 2009 03:26
that is very useful
thank u very much
September 21st, 2009 20:02
sianz:
open the .reg file in Notepad and insert a hyphen in each of the registry values.
i.e. change [HKEY_LOCAL...]
into [-HKEY_LOCAL...]
Save it as delete_GrantAdminFullControl.reg or whatever you’d like and run it if you don’t like the feature. Same with any registry file you want to try out.
You can also just delete a value but leave a key by adding the hyphen after the equals sign in the file.
August 28th, 2009 06:31
This tip turned out to be a lifesaver. The key is quite safe. All it does is to add a right-click context menu, which can be invoked to execute a command prompt to take ownership of the file or folder. Without this I would have been forced to downgrade to Windows XP. I was trying to copy custom files from an old hard drive mounted in a new machine and kept getting “file access denied” errors. The solution actually was to take ownership of the files on the hard drive I was attempting to copy from. (This hard drive will be trashed when copy is complete so there’s no security risk) I suppose if you’re an IT admin you might want to remove the registry key when finished or (in Windows 7) set up a system restore point before executing the regedit but as a home user who just wants control of my own machine I see no reason to not keep it, and I hope Microsoft eventually includes this in Windows 7.
August 23rd, 2009 07:52
@Phred, no, in IT, you learn that registry editing is at your own risk, don’t do it if you have no idea what you are doing.
July 10th, 2009 02:15
In IT we all learn about backup – so that we can return to where we were originally, don’t we?
So where is the instruction to uninstall this registry entry?
June 19th, 2009 21:15
how do i change back to normal the folder i click this on??? help!!