Vista User Account Control

[tigershard]

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

Comments

[haroldkirsch]

The problem isn't that you're prompted a lot... it's that Windows is still designed in such a way that regular users often encounter administrative tasks.

Look at deleting a shortcut from the desktop. If a program puts one in the 'all users' desktop, that means you need to elevate to delete it.

Mac OS X uses the same permissions scheme, of least user access. On the other hand, the operating system is designed so that you only encounter prompts when you're really manipulating something that's a system-wide setting. It was designed that way from the start (of OS X)... Vista is Windows, but suddenly it's Windows that asks you for admin permission for all those admin things it was designed to let you / require you to do all the time.

This isn't a mac vs windows thing, although I think OS X gets the permissions elevation thing right. I rarely feel inconvenienced by a password prompt, whereas some things in Vista require clicking a button to ask to elevate, elevating, and then optionally entering a password if you're not admin.