Is Vista Less Secure than Windows XP Because UAC Sucks?
In Windows Vista, the UAC is “User Access Control”. This is basically where you can have fine grained control (finally) over what users can do when they are logged into your PC. What you get to is based on your access priveleges, and part of UAC is the basis for those hilarious Mac vs. PC commercials where ‘Vista’ keeps asking PC “Allow or Deny” to every single thing he wants to do.
While UAC allows you to restrict other users, even though you (as the owner) are an ‘administrator’ – you are constantly plagued with the “allow or deny” prompts over and over again. If you read this ZDNet article it talks about people disabling the UAC because it’s so annoying. Basically – for many users Vista will be less secure than Windows XP was for them because they can’t stand the annoying UAC prompts. So a “security feature” is so non-user-friendly that it makes people take adverse action!!
I have to say though – I had to turn UAC off, and it had nothing to do with all the crazy prompts. I login to work through VPN, and the work using “remote desktop” the browser has to download a very small (signed) java file to securely connect. The browser WOULD NOT install and run the java applet unless I turned all security down to low and turned off UAC. In other words – I HAD TO BE MORE INSECURE just to CONNECT to WORK the same way I had in XP for years.
So I guess – Windows Vista is now less secure for me too!
January 29th, 2008 at 9:54 pm
[...] hard to imagine the security experts at Microsoft actually believe UAC in its present form is a good security solution. Having watched many users in action on Vista, it’s only a matter of minutes before most [...]
February 18th, 2008 at 6:31 pm
Press Windows + R, enter secpol.msc and hit enter Click on Security Settings, Local Policies Security Options, double-click User Account Control: Behavior of the elevation prompt for administrators in Admin Approval Mode, choose Elevate without prompting, click ok. This setting becomes immediately active. Test it by launching an application that used to give you a prompt and you will see that it now start without warning you. Now such applications will work smoothly and cleanly in Vista just as it did in XP.
This leaves Vista User Account Control enabled and tinkers just a bit with some of the settings of UAC instead of completely disabling the UAC function which disables the complete security feature in Windows Vista, which is not a wise thing to do.