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Technology Stocks : Windows Vista

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Nov 26 3:59 PM EST

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From: sammy™ -_-	5/20/2006 11:18:34 PM
	of 1939

A lot of people concerned about the new security features that will be present in Windows Vista. Specifically, people are worried that these new features are going to get in the way of them using their system. Ed Bott on his ZDNet blog External Link does a very good job of examining the User Account Control (or UAC) feature of Windows Vista. He's shown the basic dialog boxes that both Administrators and standard users will see depending on what's going on with their system. UAC is a great step forward in PC security. Problem is, despite it being useful I can still see a whole raft of users disabling it. If you're already the kind of user that has program control installed on your PC (most firewalls and some antivirus packages come with program control) then you're already used to seeing these kinds of prompts and dealing with them. But to people who, for one reason or another, don't run firewalls or antivirus applications this barrage of dialog boxes is going to come as a major surprise. And an annoying surprise at that. There's no real hope for people who want a totally smooth PC experience (until something goes wrong that is). These are people who are ultimately weasels to their future-selves and will trade minor inconvenience in the now for more major headaches in the future. However, Microsoft needs to work on convincing users who first see these warnings that: * They are there for their own protection * They only appear when Windows needs the user to confirm some important change * As a rule users shouldn't see too many of them during normal running One feature that might help is a "I'm installing - don't disturb me with notifications for XX minutes" feature that would allow users to suppress warnings for a period of time. This would be handy when carrying out installations. It would need some caveats attached but it would reduce on the annoyance of the dialog boxes when setting up. One thing that worries me about UAC is that it's going to encourage people to type in admin passwords all over the place. Unless users keep an eye the dialog boxes they could be duped into leaking their password. Still, UAC is clearly steps in the right direction. edbott.com

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