A Fresh Look at Vista's User Account Control

Art Grimm writes to mention a post at Ed Bott's Microsoft Report on ZDNet. There, he talks about Vista's User Account Control, and the issues he sees with the setup as it exists now. From the article: "The UAC prompts I depicted in the first post are those that appear when you install a program, when you run a program that requires access to sensitive locations, or when you configure a Windows setting that affects all users. But as many beta testers have discovered, UAC prompts can also show up when you perform seemingly innocent file operations on drives formatted using NTFS. In this post, I explain why these prompts appear and why some so-called Windows experts miss the obvious reason (and the obvious fix)."

Comments

Windows easy to use, HAH

[mrraven]

Jawtheshark sed:

"Oh, and those that say that you can't run in Limited User on XP (as in the fine article is stated) are completely ignorant. I'm running Limited right now, and I have no problem. Granted, I have to set the ACLs on both directories and registry settings, but it's never been very hard. The only program I've never been able to run as non-admin is a game called "Children Of The Nile", and I still don't know how to run it as a Limited User. The user that needed it got the "Run As" option checked in the shortcut. Sure she has Admin access that way, but she's my sister and knows that she shouldn't run Admin."

Jeezus that's as difficult as editing config files to get your mouse or sound to work on Linux. If you really think Joe Six pack is going to edit their access control lists to enable their limited user account on XP you are really dreaming. Even if Joe Sixpack figures out how to use access control lists they are going to be damn annoyed to go to all that work and STILL not have all their programs work, I know I'd be annoyed...

At the risk of sounding like an utter Mac fan boy, OS X gets it exactly right, it creates a user level account and no root account by default and then has a slick gui that (sudos or sus???) and asks for a password ONCE when you install software that modifies system files. Cleanly implemented and secure what's not to like? That's the way a secure simple desktop OUGHT to work.

Ubuntu Linux is set up in a similar fashion though I had to modify xorg conf files to get my mouse working and NEVER got sound working despite RTFM, ubutu forums, blah, blah. Linux/BSD makes a great server but isn't ready for the desktop and NEITHER is Windows.