- Latest Windows 11 preview patch has security addition
- Prevent non-admin users from accessing the Storage panel in Settings
- This was done to prevent unauthorized people from tampering with the contents of your drive(s), but it was not advertised and might confuse some people.
The latest Windows 11 patch, which it should be noted is a preview version, made a change to the operating system settings that might confuse some people.
Windows Latest discovered that the KB5074105 patch applies a discrete tweak whereby Windows 11 now asks for administrator permission when you enter Storage settings.
In other words, when you open the Storage panel in the Settings app, Windows 11 will open a “user account control” dialog before giving you access, one that contains different options depending on the type of local account you have.
If you have an administrator account, which will be the case if yours is the only local account configured and it is your PC, then you only need to click “Yes” to the question about whether you want the (Settings) app to be able to make changes to your device. Then you will be able to see all the Storage options normally.
However, if you are not an administrator, as would be the case for other family members, for example with a family PC that many people use, you will be blocked from accessing this Storage panel (unless you enter the administrator password, that is, the one that will be required to access).
Analysis: a sensible move, but one that could confuse some people
In short, this prevents anyone who is not an administrator from messing with anything to do with storage.
As such, it offers Windows 11 users a higher level of security in case a family member might go “rogue”, or an unauthorized person with local access somehow accesses the PC, meaning they can’t tamper with your drive and, for example, delete content. (It could also prove to be a hurdle even for a hacker who is potentially leveraging remote access to access your PC, although it wouldn’t be much of a significant hurdle in that scenario, but still, it’s something.)
Therefore, it makes some sense to keep the operation of the storage panel accessible only to the primary user of the PC (the owner or administrator).
The problem is that with this change without warning, when the box appears out of nowhere the first time you access the storage panel, there might be some confusion as to why this question appears (when it never appeared before). It also breaks the flow of the interface to display these warning messages, which adds another click to any storage-related operations.
Overall, though, it seems sensible to keep certain more sensitive parts of the Windows 11 interface behind what is effectively a closed door, but we should have received some sort of notification from Microsoft about this move.
Note that this is an optional change for now, in the preview update that arrived at the end of January, but it will become part of the full Windows 11 update for February, arriving next week, assuming Microsoft is happy with how this functionality works.
On this last note, it seems there may be a minor error with this introduction, because as Windows Latest points out, a couple of drive cleanup options appear to have disappeared from the Storage panel. We’re told this refers to temporary files that come from old Windows updates and device drivers, so we hope Microsoft is aware of this and fixes it so they can be cleaned up again. They can still be removed using Disk Cleanup, Windows Latest tells us, as an alternative.
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