Windows 7 UAC Popup Control

Windows 7 attempts to improve upon the Windows Vista User Account Control.  For those who don’t know what user account control is, it is that annoying dialog box that frequently pops up in Vista.  The UAC popup asks you whether you actually wanted to do the intended action.  This action might be accessing the control panel or modifying a system file etc.

Windows Vista UAC Pop UP

The purpose of UAC is to prevent trojan horses, viruses, or unauthorized programs from automatically changing your system settings.  Hence, if a malicious program tried to modify your computer, a UAC dialog box would come up and alert you.  Knowing that you didn’t cause the change, you would have the opportunity to deny the action.  This all sounds great in principle, but has ended up causing alot more frustration than help.  I have observed users just ignoring the Windows UAC messages or stating that the UAC dialog boxes are just plain annoying.  Windows 7 attempts to improve upon these frustrations.  In fact, I havent seen a UAC message while using Windows 7.  This is a huge change considering that I might see 10 notifcations a  day while using Vista. Whats also nice is that Windows 7 gives you the ability to tweak UAC.  For example, if you are a very parinod user who wants to know every change on your computer, you can move the Windows 7 slider to the “always notify” setting.  While, if you are a user that wants the machine to take care of everything simply leave the slider in middle.  Finally, if you dont want to be annoyed by a popup, simply disable UAC by setting the slider to “never notfiy.”  In summary, I really like the control that Windows 7 gives you in tweakin UAC.  With Vista you were only able to turn on or off the UAC functionality and that was also a difficult process.