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)."

Warning: TFA is unreadable

[jeblucas]

I went to the first three pages, which corresponds to about the first 19 words of this "article". He has room for about a sentence and a half and a graphic of the windows he's complaining about before you have to click (more) or Next >>. In fact, I can confidently say

(more) [jebshouse.com]

Well, it figures

[Giant Ape Skeleton]

With more and more people using Firefox, all those popups had to go somewhere...

Didnt like it...

[Virtual Karma]

I didnt quiet like the dialoge boxes because all of those are jarred on the right and bottom borders, as if someone has tore them off..... oh! wait...

Windows experts?

[Anonymous Coward]

"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!

Re:Warning: TFA is unreadable

[jeblucas]

...that this is the most annoying article I've seen posted in a long time. I even tried the "trick" of looking at the "Print this Article" and "Email This Article" links, which actually want to PRINT SOMETHING (it opens a Print dialog) or email a LINK to one page of the article. Garbage garbage garbage.

Re:How annoying

[AKAImBatman]

this one is like two sentences, a picture and a "more" button.

I think he was trying to capture the "flavor" of Windows Vista. i.e. You'll be spending 90% of your time clicking...

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through...

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the dialog...

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boxes. Each one of...

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these boxes...

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will annoy you with something else...

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incredibly trivial.

The options

[eclectro]

This is the crux from the end of the article;

"How do you work around this annoyance? You have three choices:

        * You can take ownership of the files on the external drive. That gives your account Full Control permissions at all times and prevents other users on the same computer from changing the files unless they do so as an administrator.
        * Or you can change the permissions assigned to the Users group so that members of that group have Write or Full Control permissions. That solution allows everyone with a user account on the computer to manage files without having to OK a consent dialog box."
        * Or you can play a Sony music CD with a rootkit."

Re:Well, it figures

[Keith Russell]

Where were they all before computers started doing popups?

X10 was the big bang.

Oh No...

[googleaseerch]

The UAC's involved in this now, too? All hell's gonna break loose.

easy to fix

[rcamans]

I got this from somewhere:

        Start an elevated command prompt window, and from that window run secpol.msc.

        Find all the policies that start with "User Account Control" (there are only, like, six of them) and set them to either no prompt or disabled.
That's all there is to it. You'll never need to "run elevated" and you'll never be bothered by those pop-ups again

Thank you, whoever posted this fix.

Re:How annoying

[oringo]

You took this wrong, mate. The author is a genius and he's giving you a preview of how annoying the Vista UAC is going to be through a web simulation!

Terrifying

[bcmm]

I really cannot think of a scarier idea than Microsoft working with the Union Aerospace Corporation [wikipedia.org].

Re:How annoying

[moochfish]

It's web 2.0 in action!

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We've successfully ported an upcoming feature in Vista

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to the web!