If you can remember way back in the Vista days, you shouldn’t forget user account control, or commonly refereed to as UAC. UAC was a feature introduced in Vista where it basically asks you to confirm everything that’s going to modify your computer in some way. If you want to run a program with admin privileges, open the registry editor (pictured to the left), move some files around, or even install a program, you will see this message by default, that is, if you didn’t turn it off.

When I was first using Vista, I honestly hated this feature. I ended up disabling it entirely because I found it to be so annoying. Some people like to keep this on because it reminds them of Mac OS X or even Linux; in my opinion, I don’t think it’s like it at all. UAC was more annoying than any other operating system’s security feature out there.

Around last year, I was already using Windows 7. I noticed that Microsoft really did a lot of work with their UAC feature. Even right now, I still have my UAC turned completely off. Mainly because I know I’m not going to catch a virus easily for the fact that I know every file that goes onto my system.

You may ask, if it’s turned off in Windows 7 pretty much, why am  I even talking about it in the first place. Raimund Genes, Trend Micros CEO, said:

I’m not saying Windows 7 is insecure, but out of the box Vista is better.

I never thought of it that way, but he’s right. Windows 7 is insecure compared to Vista out of the box, even I notice that. But it’s obviously because Vista annoys you with every action you take.

In the end, Windows 7 is a great operating system, but it really seems Microsoft wanted to make Windows 7 less as annoying. You can always change the settings, but most people probably do not want more UAC notifications.

Source: ZDNet

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