Windows 7: UAC off, now what?

Having the slider all the way to the bottom is the same as having UAC off.

Along with an anti virus, i always recommend to have things like threatfire or iobit.

A drawback is that with UAC off you lose the ability to turn on "In-Private Filtering" in IE8. (Brink has a nice short tutorial on how to keep it turned on.)

It was a PITA coming from XP and dealing with UAC at first, I agree, but if you set it to one up from the bottom you gain some protection that otherwise would be missing, and it isn't that intrusive.

As far as I remember, I have it off too in Windows 7. But it wasn't because of popup annoyance. It's because I had problems with writing files to this directory :

C:\Program Files\StepMania\Songs\My Creations\*song name folder*\*song name*.sm

which opens with Notepad. In my case I used Notepad++ but he wasn't able to save the file because he didn't have the rights. Turning off UAC wipe the problem away.

Hmmm, I didn't know that. Firefox has the ability to use private browsing without UAC activation.

if you have uac on you have to open notepad++ with admin rights in order to save in program files directory

Correct - and this is yet another example of poorly coded applications (fueled, in part, by Microsoft's release of XP all those years ago). Applications should not be writing to the Program Files directory at all - that is what the users tree (formerly Documents and Settings) is for. Program Files is a (necessarily) restricted area b/c with free access to the Program Files tree, you need to double and triple your protection -anything (malicious or not) that gets in at all will also have unbridled access to the programs in that Program Files directory, including, but not limited to, IE, Office, WL stuff, Java, etc.

Obviously, if it is not malicious, you're golden, but if it is? Unless your protection catches it faster than you can say SuperCalliFragiListicExpiAlliDocious (or whatever) it would wreak a large amount of havoc on your system - just like they could with XP, which is the main failure point of XP.

Seriously, if that app will not allow you to write to another folder, find another app - it is extremely poorly coded to be writing data to a subfolder of its own installation. Even *nix does this, and has been doing it for many more years than Windows has been....

That is also a workaround - and an easy one (same with Notepad) to get it working - but, again, it should not be saving files to that location in the first place - I mean, is it called "Program and Data Files"? Nope - it is called "Program Files" - and that is for a reason.

Since this is an advanced OS, if nothing else, make a hardlink / junction from that location it wants to save to to a folder you have write access to without needing elevated privileges, and that should make both you and the program happy....

Here is a good explanation about the odds and ends of UAC: Tech Oddity » User Account Control (UAC)

Nice - although that is more geared toward Vista, most of it still applies.