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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)."
Could they possibly make that "article" any more annoying? They'd have been better-served to turn it into a flash-animated slide show. I'm not going to click all the way through that thing.
Either put it all on one or two pages (interspersed with ads if you must), or put it into a slide show if the article is written as a slide show.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
The whole point of Administrator is that you know what you do and you can Admin a machine securely. I know Joe Sixpack doesn't know how to, but doing this will put Admins all over the world in the place of "Limited User". In the end our Dear Joe Sixpack will just click and click until the task is done anyway. He will be frustrated and will get spyware anyway.
What we need is the equivalent of a Car Mechanic for administration. You call your mechanic and he'll do the maintenance for a fee. Frankly, it's the only way for home users.
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.
No, all problems are just the cause of the legacy of poor security in the past. Nagging dialogboxes won't help.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
With more and more people using Firefox, all those popups had to go somewhere...
The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
I wish they would work a bit on account control on WinXP, it is a total disaster. I WANT to use my computer as a limited user, but when I need to do something in Administrator, I shouldn't be bothered to switch users. Why oh why can't they just make it so that is asks for the admin password like with every other goddamned OS!?!
Vista is nice and all that, but how about fixing XP first!!!!
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
"I explain why these prompts appear and why some so-called Windows experts miss the obvious reason (and the obvious fix)."
Well, good thing MS targets this OS exclusively to Windows experts. What utter fools we've all been for assuming this would effect our non-expert friends and families!
Running as a Limited User is not impossible.
It just requires spending a LOT of time and effort to LEARN how to do so
and that pre-supposes that the person understands the risk of running as Administrator.
So, someone has to already be aware of the threat
Then that person has to choose to try to avoid that threat
Then, then that person has to spend time becoming further educated
Then, then, then that person has to spend time fixing the ACL's and such.
Or just choose to run as Administrator and all those problems go away (and you get new problems, but all your apps run).
I like the options "Continue" / "Skip" / "Cancel". Very obvious for a normal user what the difference between Skip & Cancel is ;-)