My first impression of the User Account Control (UAC) feature in Windows Vista was good, but things change. UAC provides a form of protection against undesirable and/or malicious changes by requiring confirmation for certain tasks - which reminded me of Ubuntu Linux 6.06, which prompts for the administrative password for system changes. That would have been the good news.

The bad news is that MS went overboard with this feature, and every other little config change now requires confirmation. Big time waster. Plus, you have "the boy who cried wolf" phenomena - too many warnings, and the warnings are no longer taken seriously. In one sense, Vista is one gigantic nag machine that alerts you to many things that IMHO the OS should just silently deal with. Security Center popups are especially annoying when they steal focus (shame on you).

After running the release version of Vista Business these last few weeks, I became so tired of the hard disk spinning up again and again, so today I turned off all that stuff. Like Windows Defender, responsible for much of the disk thrashing. While carving the system into something that I felt was useable, I also turned off nonsense features that the PC doesn't have (but the services were running) like wireless config (no wireless), audio config (no speakers), Windows Time (not on a domain), etc. etc. and wound up with a nice quiet stable machine.