Vista Security is tight and I can understand the need to lock down the system to some degree. But UAC is nothing short of annoying, so much so that it becomes a totally worthless feature. After using UAC for a few minutes you won't be reading any prompts and blindly prompting every link spawned. This is not security - this is making things worse by giving people a false sense of security.

It's relatively straight forward to turn off UAC, but as it turns out this doesn't quite get you all the way where you might expect. 

Here’s my scenario: I somehow managed to hose Media Player on my Vista install. It was working fine, now when I start it up it plays one song or video or whatever, but it’s completely non-responsive and just shows an hour glass. Once the content is done MP just hangs. Can’t close, can’t play – it’s dead.

I don’t see a way to fix this. You can’t ‘uninstall’  Media Player, and there’s no such thing as a ‘repair’ install for media player (there are options for whether I want the shortcuts on the desktop and taskbar whooppie!).

So my thought: I can nuke the Media Player folder and force Windows to recopy and hopefully reconfigure the installation.

Think again. I can’t delete the Media Player directory. I’m logged in as an Administrator and I have User Access Security disabled. Nope, can’t delete. I can use the RUN box and Run As Administrator. Nope that won’t do it either. Command Box with with Run As… Administrator. Nope no good either.

Somewhere I read you can log on as THE Administrator account– unfortunately I can’t figure how to do that. If I log off I get to the Login prompt, but the Administrator User is not showing up and I can’t select it anyway that I can see. No go on that end.

This is stupid, stupid, stupid! Fine, make it explicit that I can and maybe want to shoot myself in the foot. Give me a legal disclaimer, but please folks don’t treat me like a fucking idiot and put a self locking lid dangling from the ceiling with no ladder. There are going to be instances when we do need access to these protected resources.

Here’s another scenario that didn’t work for the same reason. I would like to ditch NotePad for NotePad2 as my main editor. I haven’t been able to do that because I can’t move, rename or delete NotePad.exe in the System folder. In fact I can’t delete just about nothing in the system folder.

There are other areas where this is also annoying: Accessing the system portion of your Documents folder is also inaccessible. So for example you can't explore into the SendTo or Start Menu folders (there are Run command shortcuts like SendTo and Favorites that take you there though, but it doesn't work for everything). It certainly doesn't work with the All Users folder, so forget changing your startmenu settings for anything that went there.

Granted these aren’t every day scenarios, but there are going to be times that you might need to access these files and double check or change them. And it really bites to know what you need to do and be locked out by the system when I am in fact the Administrator of this system. There's no one else with higher authority here to slap me down.

Except for Microsoft now...

I suppose UAC is a reasonable idea if you're coming from a purely security based view of the world. Sure you don't want that spyware to take over your system and start hacking your System directory or start spouting email, but is that worth the price of admission if it makes using the computer an annoying feat?

Security must be dealt with at the point of entry. That's where the effort should go to make it much harder to install anything suspicious on your machine. Modern software and the OS for that matter should be able to sniff out what resources an application requires and tell you up front what's required and allow you to check off on that. If it goes beyond that then pop up a security dialog because then at least you've set the limits to be overstepped. This is hard, but this is what it will take to conquer this security nightmare that we live in not silly dialogs on everything you do that will be ignored wholesale.

The idea to lock down the system so it becomes a time sing and nuisance or at the very least annoying has hell is just not going to fly... You watch. UAC will be the first thing anybody who knows the least bit about computers will try to turn off on a system. The rest of the folks who can't figure it out, will just be pissed of and inclined to look for an Operating System that lets them get on with life... I can't blame them if they do...