Windows Vista's User Account Control (UAC)
Microsoft has added a feature called User Account Control (UAC) to help improve Windows Vista's security. It requires you to authorize certain activities such as installing an application or making some changes to the system. If you are logged on as a regular user (i.e. non-administrator account) UAC will prompt you for the administrator account's password. If you are logged in as an administrator, you will still be prompted with an Allow/Deny prompt (see screen shot below). Why are admin's prompted? When you login with an administrator level account, you receive two tokens, one with standard priviledges and one with elevated privileges. You are using the standard token and when you perform a task that requires the higher privileges, you are prompted.
I've been using Vista since Beta 1 and have always kept UAC enabled, even after installing the final release version. It's a minor annoyance, but one I'm willing to live with for better system security. My concern is that most people wil lfind it a major annoyance and disable it.
So what about you? If you are running Vista, I invite you to vote in the poll on the right. Can you live with Vista' UAC?
Al Degutis