Windows UAC: Bye! Bye!
Posted February 2, 2010 – 3:24 pm
Ugh! I give up.
Windows Vista UAC Takes a Dive!
Yesterday, I disabled User Account Control (UAC) in Vista for good. Could there be a more invasive, yet ultimately useless program?
After 13 frustrating months using UAC, I still have no idea what it is supposed to be protecting me from — whatever it is, it has never, ever happened.
As part of my recent efforts to increase productivity and streamline workflows, I realized it was time for a change yesterday when, for the nth time, I tried to figure out what UAC is supposed to do — and I couldn’t.
In my search for answers, I found only techie jibberish or vague explanations, such as this from Microsoft’s website:
User Account Control (UAC) is a feature in Windows that can help prevent unauthorized changes to your computer. UAC does this by asking you for permission or an administrator password before performing actions that could potentially affect your computer’s operation or that change settings that affect other users. When you see a UAC message, read it carefully, and then make sure the name of the action or program that’s about to start is one that you intended to start.
Uh, huh. I suppose it sounds vaguely useful – until I realized that not once in the 13 months has it ever activated when I haven’t been explicitly trying to do something. Unlike my Norton Anti-virus program which is constantly (and more or less silently) picking off various threats that are invisible to me. UAC is constantly stopping me from doing things that I purposefully want to be doing. How is that helpful?
Even after trying to understand, I still don’t really quite know what the point is — or what some relevant ‘use cases’ might be. Is it to stop my cubemate from tinkering with my computer? Except I don’t have a cubemate. Is it supposed to prevent viruses that somehow get past Norton from doing more damage? Except that has never happened.
Looking back, I’m not sure why I soldiered onward with UAC for so long given how much time I’m on my computer — or how bogus UAC alerts I’ve clicked thru. I think I’d have ditched it much earlier if I hadn’t been using Norton Labs’ UAC tool. That program has probably cut my warnings by 90%, but even the remaining 10% is too many.
So when I paused and realized that it had never, ever stopped anything I hadn’t wanted done, I realized it was time to say…
Bye, bye!!
Click here if you want to turn off UAC, too.
