There’s a rather interesting dilemma that will come out in Windows Vista. Vista is going to introduce this newer “user account protection†( i think that’s the most recent name…they keep changing it) that will essentially require you to provide your administrative password to make any significant changes to the computer. Pretty much like on the OSX computers when it’d ask you for the admin password if you tried to install or delete a program for example. It all comes from unix/linux contrary to OSX people trying to say Microsoft is copying OSX again….anyways, back on topic. The short version is, the problem is already coming out in a big way that tons of beta testers are annoyed with this new protection. One of the first thing I do whenever i install vista now is immediately go in and turn off the user account protection. It’s like someone saying “are you really sure you want to do that?†…it’s irritating. However, purely from a security point of view it makes a lot of sense to use it, and again from a security perspective it’s horrible that people are shutting it off because these are the same people who will later be bitching about windows being insecure and about having problems with IE7. As it turns out (to put it briefly) IE7 is set to run in this protected area of the computer from now on…it will be running under an user account with almost not privileges so that spyware/adware/viruses will no longer be able to access/alter/change systems files in any way. This is a very good thing…But, when people turn off this account protection it also brings IE7 back into the good old normal user area where it can cause all kinds of problems like normal. …Just some thoughts.
The Problem with User Account Protection in Vista
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Wandering the Interwebs 