Windows Vista has introduced a new technology to Windows-based PCs called User Account Control (UAC). The idea behind it is that if a user makes a change which could potentially effect the system in a detrimental way, a dialogue box is shown in order to tell the user this change is going to happen, and to ask for confirmation. The user can cancel out, and no change is made. It also protects against rogue background applications doing bad things. The most common being a downloaded trojan which installs a ton of junk into startup locations, so every reboot, it re-installs everything, thus slowing the spread of malware.
It’s similar in some respects to the admin prompts Mac OS X uses when asking for permission to make system changes. Various Linux distros also do the same, including Ubuntu and SuSE.
When it was added to Windows, it managed to attract a lot of criticism, and negative coverage. In the early beta releases of Vista, it would pop up almost constantly, often during quite trivial changes. The developers at Microsoft honed it, and now, it’s actually quite unobtrusive.
When I moved to Vista, I did exactly what most people did – switched it off. Recently, I was goaded into re-enabling it though, which I have, and thus far, it hasn’t really caused any problems. It will pop up when installing new applications, and when launching system applications I could break things with, like the Windows registry editor, regedit. That’s fair enough. It might slow down fiddlers who think they know what they’re doing.
One thing I’ve come to realise though, is that there is a time when disabling UAC would be a good idea. I often produce system builds at work for deployment to many desktop PCs, and a great number of installs take place on that base setup. Clicking through all those UAC prompts would probably drive me slightly insane, so disabling UAC at that point wouldn’t be a bad idea. It’s a fairly controlled environment; I’m not browsing the web, I’m only installing known, tested things, so in theory, should be safe. Once everything is as I want it, I could re-enable it, to stop users breaking all my hard work!
Similarly, my home PC could be treated the same way. I could disable it when I first set the PC up, then re-enable it when I’m happy everything is as I want it. Then I have protection from rogue applications, and me doing stupid things.
In my day-to-day use, I’ve not seen it much, and when I have, I’ve expected it. I think it could prove to be useful.