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User Account Control: yes, you can turn it off. Is this a good or a bad thing?
Monday, September 11th, 2006
Windows Vista has a new security feature dubbed "User Account Control" that has 
been the focus of much criticism since it was first seen in early builds. If you haven’t come across it, let me explain. UAC interrupts installation routines and most attempts to make significant changes to a computer’s setup, and it does this to accomplish two things: 1) alert you that a system change is going down, and 2) get your approval. If you are logged in as an administrator, UAC asks for your "OK," while standard users will be required to provide an administrative password. Users of OS X and various Linux desktops are quite familiar with the general concept of needing to supply administrator credentials to make serious changes to the system. That is, this is nothing new.
User Account Control has been most criticized for the frequency with which it pops up on the screen. Even though the alerts have been scaled back in Vista RC1, UAC alerts are common enough that the average user can still expect to see them whenever they are making system changes or installing applications that change program defaults or make other significant modifications. Is this a bad thing? There is one school of thought that takes UAC out to the shed for a beating, arguing that UAC merely desensitizes users to system changes and thereby plants the seeds of its own futility. After being prompted to use it a dozen or so times, users will simply click right through it—or so the argument goes. User Account Control: yes, you can turn it off. Is this a good or a bad thing?
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