OTOH, I was *ecstatic* that Vista was *finally* telling me that things were running in the background that I didn't necessarily want running.
You have to realize that with Windows XP anything could run in the background and if you were not aware of it, C'est la vie - you ran the risk of being hosed by a backdoor / Trojan / downloader every time you connected to the internet.
With Vista, if it needed to write to the restricted areas of the file system or registry, you were warned. if you were annoyed by it, then chances are you really weren't sure what was going on in the first place. Not all users who consider themselves technically proficient are actually that - technically proficient. They may *think* so, but being so is a completely different matter.
You may know your computer inside and out (like I do mine) but how well do you know your OS? Do you know the names of all files and are able to spot malicious looking files in a nanosecond? b/c if you don't spot them that fast, with the power of today's machines, they have already executed.
Furthermore, the same sort of thing was prevalent in IE back in the day - with ActiveX all versions of IE had the ability to ask the user before automatically installing - it was on the user to make sure that it asked every time. However, since the onus fell upon the user, the user became annoyed with the prompts and more often than not would check the box that said "Do not ask (meaning warn) me anymore" - and then wondered how something got installed on their machine without them knowing it.
The onus has always been on the user - but the user has rarely been willing to take the fall. In the end, M$ tried to make the user more safe - and the user rebelled, turning off UAC left and right, with software developers even advocating such.
IDGAF HOW proficient you think you are - turning off UAC is plainly idiotic. With the proliferation of 0-day attacks, combined with the proliferation of botnets and zombified machines, even *considering* turning off UAC is ludicrous. And I am not an ordinary, geek-loving proficient-using person - I have been using computers for well over 20 years and have been active in the forums for beta testing OSs, programs, and security programs. I test all sorts of new things, and until it folder I was contributing to 0-day spam and scam warnings and attacks at Castle Cops (once I learned how to get the syslog entries from my router to a daemon for parsing).
Wanna know what i have on my W7 64bit box? Malwarebytes Antimalware; M$ Security Essentials; UAC; WinPatrol.
Wanna know what I had in XP? Symantec AV Corporate Edition 6, then 8 (from work), Spybot S&D, Spywareblaster, ERUNT, WinPatrol, Ad-Aware, Hosts list, Clam AV on USB, and a lot more products (at least 4) that I cannot remember.
If you're annoyed by UAC - then you have too many things running that 'need' (or so they say) administrative privileges. I have *many* things needing administrative privileges - eVGA's Precision utility is one of them - but I deal with clicking the OK button so I can be that much more assured that my computer is running like it should - and that things that I don't want running are not.
UAC is not a substitute in and of itself - but it goes a long way to protecting the user from himself - until that user disables that very protection.
In spite of my diatribe, though, I will say this - it's *yours* to use. just be sure you *really* know what you are doing if you want to disable it.
