Vista’s User Access Control - Boon or Bane?

Windows Vista

If you have a Windows Vista machine, you are quite familiar with the User Access Control (UAC). Either you hate it or you love it. In my experience, advanced users don’t like it while beginners to intermediate users like it.Vista UAC

For those of you who either use a previous version of Windows, Mac OS X, or a Linux box, UAC is a new hassle feature of Windows Vista where the whole screen darkens and a pop-up window appears asking you if you are sure you want to do the action you initiated.

The idea behind this is that if a virus or spyware program tried to run something potentially harmful, you would have a visual notification of it and you would have to give permission for the action to go through. The only drawback is that you are interrupted.


Power Users

The reason I say power users don’t like UAC is because they are more likely to be hardcore multitasking. You would look at their screen and see 3 Mozilla Firefox windows open with 10-20 tabs going, PhotoShop running, Adobe After Effects rendering, and 6 notepad windows with notes about all of it (including a note to do a backup tonight). A super user doesn’t want to be slowed down by the Operating System, let alone getting a pop-up every time they run an unrecognized program.

General Users

Now the beginning to intermediate user aren’t using their computer for 50 different things at once and aren’t bothered by a pop-up here or there. They have Internet Exlporer open while typing into Microsoft Word and transferring their pictures from their 5 MegaPixel digital cameras to their hard drive.

Obviously super users expect more from their computers. A pop-up at the wrong time could seriously mess with their concentration, leaving them unproductive for the next 20 minutes while they scramble for some semblance of order. Don’t laugh, it does happen. Any writer, programmer, graphics designer, or audio technician can tell you that any distraction (in the smallest degree) could result in 10 or more minutes of lost productivity.

Productivity Signaling

And you always wondered why music studios have signs that tell you when they are recording and photographer dark rooms have lights warning they are working. It is so someone doesn’t walk in and distract them when doing so would be disastrous to their productivity. I personally wish I had a light like this outside my door. Sometimes it seems like my family waits for me to get in the groove so they can ask me to go to the store to pick up two eggs.

Good News for Power Users

I have some good news for the power users out there. There is a way for you to disable Window’s UAC. Warning: This is not for the general user. The use of this technique resulting in your computer becoming a virus laden doorstop is not my responsibility.

 

Using Control Panel

  1. Open Control Panel.

  2. Under User Account and Family settings click on the “Add or remove user account”.

  1. Click on one of the user accounts, for example you can use the Guest account.

  2. Under the user account click on the “Go to the main User Account page” link.

  1. Under “Make changes to your user account” click on the “Change security settings” link.

  1. In the “Turn on User Account Control (UAC) to make your computer more secure” click to unselect the “Use User Account Control (UAC) to help protect your computer”. Click on the Ok button.

  1. You will be prompted to reboot your computer. Do so when ready.

In order to re-enable UAC just select the above checkbox and reboot.

Remember, we here at the Daily Fuzz take no responsibility for any damage done to your computer because you disabled UAC and you weren’t absolutely sure what you were doing.

What do you think?

Do you like or dislike UAC? Do you like the idea but aren’t too sure of the way Windows goes about it? Are you dreading the idea of upgrading to Vista? Let us know in the comments.

 

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