Originally Posted by
JClishe
UAC (User Account Control) gets a TON of negative publicity for being too intrusive (UAC is what gives you the "do you really want to do this?" prompts).
It takes 4 clicks to turn UAC off. Takes about 10 seconds.
Don't like it? Turn it off and get on with your life. The sheer amount of negative publicity that one single security option gets - an option that is completely controllable by the end user - is evidence of the irrational piling on that the media does to Vista. Look, if you don't like UAC just turn it off. Don't whine about something that you can turn off anytime you want to.
I agree and I've turned off UAC on my production system. I also operated with it on for about 3 months and found that it really wasn't all that intrusive for my dady-to-day operation of the computer. I don't really need to be in control panels or event viewer or regedit all that often. The main UAC annoyance was with downloading things from the Internet, and it was a bit annoying on that front. BUT, one of the main selling points of Vista is that it is supposed to be more secure, and a big part of that is UAC. So if the solution is to just disable UAC then you aren't really getting the major benefit of better security on the system.
Oh, and it takes a reboot, too, doesn't it? So maybe a minute and 10 seconds.
Originally Posted by
JClishe
My wife is a prime example of the average user. She has an old Dell Latitude D600, its probably 3-4 years old. It has 1.5gb of RAM. About a year ago we put Vista on it. She said that she has seen no noticable difference in performance (and remember - this is a fairly old laptop), said all of her games play fine, says that she has an easier time connecting to public wireless access points (she would sporadically drop her connection in XP), and said simply that "likes Vista better". She's just your average Jane Doe non-techie user.
A laptop with 1.5GB of RAM is not typical, particularly not for a 3-4 year old device. My old company was upgrading RAM on our older laptops to support Vista and 2GB was the target, though some maxed out at 1.5GB. The D600s we had in inventory were about the same age and they were purchased with 512MB or 1GB, and that was a "lot" of RAM 3-4 years ago when they were purchased. The HW requirements are much higher for Vista, so as people try upgrading to it they are seeing the results of not having sufficient HW as much as anything else.
Microsoft (and the media) really wanted everyone to upgrade immediately and Microsoft's HW partners hoped that Vista would drive a huge hardware upgrade cycle that otherwise is unnecessary. In reality, however, most folks realized that there was no compelling demand and will just take it in stride, just like every other major OS upgrade cycle. In the meantime, however, the media and Apple will have fun poking at Microsoft and Vista and watching them squirm.
And don't forget the Windows 7 release scheduled for January 2010, with the
first set of public bits coming our at the PDC at the end of the month.