User Account Control (UAC)

One of the big features of Windows Vista, certainly one that has attracted a lot of attention, is user account control. For those of you that don't know, its intended to protect the system from the user by asking the user for permission to run software that might compromise the security of the computer.

It seems to be one of those features that attracts a lot of negative comment some deserved and some undeserved. I've been running Vista for two months now and while I can guarantee that I'll see the UAC dialog at least once a day I don't think its that intrusive, certainly no worse than some personal firewalls that pop up dialogs far more frequently in my experience. But then unlike UAC you can ignore the Firewall dialog, whereas you've no choice but to respond to the UAC dialog as it freezes the whole system until you respond. But if in the process it warns me about some dubious software that I'm about to run its probably worth it.

But then you do see the UAC dialog an awful lot when you are configuring the computer which is something you are obviously doing an awful lot of when you have just installed the new operating system. So I think some of the negative comment stems from continually bumping up against the UAC in the first few days after an upgrade as you setup the new system. But once past that initial period I don't think that most users will really bump into the UAC that much, and you can always turn it off in those inital few days.