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Originally Posted by PSYCHO
Microsoft should not assume that all users are under the age of 10 and over the age of 60.
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This has nothing to do with Microsoft. All modern operating systems have a concept of OS security, and having different levels of user privileges is an integral part of that. The problem is that the typical Windows person is still used to operating the computer like a toy running DOS, which was never even a full operating system in the strict sense of the word. In particular, DOS had no concept of security at all, and neither did the following consumer OS of the Windows variety up to and including Windows ME. This glaring deficit was eventually solved with XP (again, on the consumer side; MS' professional operating systems never had that issue) which would have had the ability to give its users strong security. Now, in preparation for the release of a real operating system for consumers (rather than the toys they sold before) Microsoft had issued guidelines (starting with Windows 95, by the way) for proper coding of Windows-compatible applications, which were supposed to get developers to write reasonable applications (that would not do idiotic stuff, like blithely replacing system files whenever they felt like it, place their own files in system folders, store user settings in system areas of the file system and registry, etc., etc.). Unfortunately, many, many developers simply ignored these guidelines. In addition, even more unfortunately, Microsoft always had a strong commitment to backwards compatibility as their prime goal, trumping everything else. So, seeing that if they simply enforced proper security on their new operating system, by creating users as Limited Users by default (which, mind you, is the equivalent of what every other serious operating system on the planet does, including Unixes, Linux, Mac OS, etc., etc.) they would have a tech support nightmare at their hands, they decided to back out and have users create accounts as administrative accounts by default. That, of course, meant that almost all of the built-in security mechanisms in XP were bypassed, and the system as run by the typical naive user was as vulnerable as ever to all sorts of malware. The consequences are well known: Windows retains a reputation for not being secure (which is nonsense), and people have to load up their machines with all sorts of crap (anti-virus, anti-spam, anti-this-and-that software, third-party firewalls, etc.) which they would have no need for if they ran their machines in a secure configuration. Now, fast-forward to Vista: Microsoft finally decides that they've had enough of this, recognizing, correctly, that it is simply impossible to have a secure operating system if users to dot make use of the vital protection afforded to them by a system of graded user privileges. So now, for the first time in Vista, they in fact force users to always operate under limited privileges (off course, they again partially back out by creating the nightmare of file and registry virtualization, but it would leads me too far to go into that; this post is already way beyond the attention span of the typical NBF visitor
) So, what happens?
Because of the crummy software that is still out there
, people immediately complain, and have nothing better to do than immediately switching off UAC, and continue to run with administrative privileges. One thing that is important to understand here is the following: If, while running a standard user-mode application, you receive a UAC prompt, then what that means is that either you are dealing with malware, or with a broken application, that is not Windows-compatible and that violates compatibility guidelines that have been out for many years. The proper reaction to this is to complain to the outfit that produced that broken piece of software, and not to Microsoft.
Quote:
| If I'm a member of the administrators group UAC needs to STFU. |
That is easy to accomplish
without shutting UAC off. See the
link I had given before. You need to disable Admin Approval Mode, not UAC.
