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.