User Account Control

[Ron Ward]

Hi,

I'm new to Vista...just started checking it out. One thing I've observed
that I really dislike is the implementation of the User Account Control.
That setting is currently at the computer level and really should be at the
individual user account level. I realize that this setting makes the
computer more secure when enabled, but it's really irritating for a power
user like myself to constantly be prompted if it's okay to perform various
tasks. I had to disable it for my personal sanity and was a little shocked
to see that this setting was a computer wide setting.

Otherwise, I'm very impressed with the look and feel of the new OS and the
performance has been excellent. There's a bug here and there, but I'm
really impressed with the overall stability and performance.

-Ron Ward

 

[Jimmy Brush]

Hello,

Sorry to hear the UAC is bugging you and you turned it off. UAC is a system
setting because it changes the way the operating system works at a very low
level and turning it off per user wouldn't work.

In my opinion, UAC is especially useful to power users because it allows you
to know when a program is using admin permissions. In this way, if you see a
program asking for permission that you didn't start or that you don't want
to have admin permission, you can stop it. Since no program can have admin
access except via a UAC prompt, you can be assured that no program is
sneaking up on you and doing who-knows-what to your computer in the
background, unless you authorize it to run of course.

With UAC turned off, every program that is run always has admin powers, even
if they don't need it, and even if you didn't start that program.

There are a few things you can do to make living with UAC better:

- Have a command prompt open that is elevated by right-clicking command
prompt in the start menu and clicking Run As Administrator. Any operation or
program that you run from this command prompt will have implicit admin
permission, and so will not throw any UAC prompts.

- Use run as administrator on explorer.exe when doing system maintenance