Vista User Account Control
I was in the beta for Windows Vista, had it running on my 3 year old gaming laptop at the time and didn't think it was too bad (I gave it a lot of leeway because it was a beta). It ran well on my older system, even with all the eye-candy on. When retail launched, and I got my free Ultimate discs in the mail, I decided to stick with Win XP because it still offered better performance and battery life, plus the drivers were mature.
I've been using Vista a lot at work, and recently on my new desktop because I wanted to play DX10 games. At work, I usually turn of Longhorn User Access Control (LUA), the confirm/deny thing. While I agree it is an obnoxious feature, it is one of the safest security solutions for a specific set of security scenarios.
Today I finally decided it is too much. On my new laptop, I went to Administrative Tools to fiddle with some settings. It wouldn't let me turn indexing off on the harddrive... it told me I needed administrator access. I have to right click Administrative Tools.... to run it with administrator access. If I'm running something called "Administrator" Tools, shouldn't it automatically run it with Administrator access?!It doesn't give me this "error" until I am a number of clicks in to the menus already. This would not be so bad if somewhere it would have told me right when I entered the tools that I will not be able to perform any functions/tasks without running it in Administrator mode.
Now, granted, there is a reason that it is like this. LUA pretty much covers everything, no matter what it is called. LUA is doing exactly what it was programmed to do, it is performing the intended behavior. To LUA, Administrator tools is no different than any other set of system setting tasks. Microsoft may have had this as a bug at some time, but decided that it was more important for a developer to be fixing bugs than programming a path for this specific case.
Try telling this to the average user. This is a perfect example of why user account control is hated, and why that Mac add was so damn effective.
I've been using Vista a lot at work, and recently on my new desktop because I wanted to play DX10 games. At work, I usually turn of Longhorn User Access Control (LUA), the confirm/deny thing. While I agree it is an obnoxious feature, it is one of the safest security solutions for a specific set of security scenarios.
Today I finally decided it is too much. On my new laptop, I went to Administrative Tools to fiddle with some settings. It wouldn't let me turn indexing off on the harddrive... it told me I needed administrator access. I have to right click Administrative Tools.... to run it with administrator access. If I'm running something called "Administrator" Tools, shouldn't it automatically run it with Administrator access?!It doesn't give me this "error" until I am a number of clicks in to the menus already. This would not be so bad if somewhere it would have told me right when I entered the tools that I will not be able to perform any functions/tasks without running it in Administrator mode.
Now, granted, there is a reason that it is like this. LUA pretty much covers everything, no matter what it is called. LUA is doing exactly what it was programmed to do, it is performing the intended behavior. To LUA, Administrator tools is no different than any other set of system setting tasks. Microsoft may have had this as a bug at some time, but decided that it was more important for a developer to be fixing bugs than programming a path for this specific case.
Try telling this to the average user. This is a perfect example of why user account control is hated, and why that Mac add was so damn effective.