Benefits of Vista's User Access Control?

Abtin Forouzandeh asks: "Having used Vista for a few months, something keeps nagging me about the user account control. For the UAC to be useful, the user needs to have a fair amount of knowledge about: what the UAC is; what application it is blocking; the consequences of blocking the action; and an alternate approach if the blocked action did something useful. Anyone who has ever worked with end-users can tell you that they are generally disinterested in learning anything about computer usage beyond how to use word and make a spreadsheet. Frankly, even as a highly technical user, I nearly always approve the UAC dialog, even if I don't know the consequences. Since users lack knowledge, and Vista keeps asking esoteric/ambiguous questions, then users will always approve UAC dialogs. Since the UAC so clearly fails in its goal of making computing more secure, and substantially increases complexity, why is it common wisdom that turning off UAC is 'not recommended'? For 99% of users, is there any true downside? Has the community come up with ways to make UAC useful?"

Comments

Re:useless but still the right thing

[cornjones]

Mod the parent up
in the long run applications will have to avoid causing UAC prompts and eventually it will be possible to secure the "windows ecosystem" without breaking common programs.

That is the important point here. There is no reason for many of these programs to be asking for 'administrative' access to do any of this shit. MS can't just cut it off b/c it will break most of it's install base. This is a way to guide software companies into writing programs with a thought to security, rather than just doing it the 'easy way'.