Vista RC1 getting thumbs up except for security feature

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 05 September 2006 16:52

Your IT - Home IT

According to blogs and reports flowing in from testers around the world, Windows Vista is just about ready for the market but there is a not so trivial issue with what is supposed to be one of its major features, security.

Reports say that Vista Release Candidate 1 (RC1) is relatively easy to install, is more plug and play than previous versions of Windows and is significantly faster than the previous beta version.

On the negative side, the first release candidate is extremely memory hungry. However, Microsoft has said that all along. The more memory you feed it, the better Vista performs they say.

The big issue for Microsoft, however, is one that Windows watchers have raised continually since the first beta arrived - the security feature known as User Account Control (UAC).

UAC is basically a watchdog system which ensures that ordinary users who don't have administrator level privileges need to go through a series of validation dialog boxes in order to accomplish certain simple administrative tasks, such as deleting or installing an application or changing the system time.

As Windows watcher Paul Thurrott says on his SuperSite for Windows (http://winsupersite.com/showcase/winvista_ff_uac.asp): "The security benefits of UAC far outweigh whatever annoyances its dialogs might cause." Because of this, Thurrott recommends that users leave the UAC alone.

However, some testers have complained that the annoyance level of UAC is so great that many users will be tempted to simply turn it off. In such cases, Vista is back to the security level of previous versions of Windows, where basically everybody had administrator level access, including rogue hackers, which sort of defeats the purpose and is the last thing Microsoft wants.

Since greatly enhanced security is one of the key features of Vista, the feedback that Microsoft gets back from testers on the UAC of RC1 may be a key deciding factor of whether we see an RC2 anytime soon.