Yup, there's definitely an issue, I've looked everywhere before decided to kill UAC (and spend few weeks debugging that very issue). I've looked everywhere, Resource Monitor, task manager, I even setup performance monitoring and trace the whole darn stack of weird processes, and it ends with me still puzzled...
Oh well... UAC off for me :)
zzz2496
How many processes do you have running? It only took 2 seconds for the window to show on my computer with UAC on.1). Right click My Computer, manage: 4.80 seconds --> window showed up
My dad just bought a laptop with Win 7, never having used 7 or Vista before.....his desktop is XP. He wouldn't consider himself an expert user, and frankly I wouldn't consider myself one either.
In talking him through some things with it, the UAC came up, and he asked me what it was, as he started reading the pop-up.....and once I explained it, before I had a chance to say anything else, he said, "Good, I like that."
For people that are really experts, I could see where it would be an annoyance......but we're not all IT techs.
UAC is not just for sercurity reasons its to stop the user from changing settings and to stop them from changing things and f***ing up settings and doing damaging and wishing that they didn't.
UAC is not for everyone i am not going to convice other members here that you should have it turned on thats what Microsoft made an option to turn it off we can argue about why you should have it on and why we should not have it on.
ok i can see your point, if UAC checks everything every time you start an elevated process (to be honest i have no idea whether it does or not) then i can see where your slowdown comes from, however, advising the user in the original thread to disable UAC and running as limited user only to avoid these slowdowns (which is what you were doing) seems to be a little pointless on that basis alone, (although i do agree with you that the safest way to run is limited user only, and "run as a seperate admin account" as needed) when i think it is unlikely that said user would be running as many processes as you are, you said yourself that your machine has a very heavy workload.
having said that, if UAC is checking everything every time (and even if it is it may well just be a bug in your particular setup) that sounds like a complete waste of processor clocks to me....
*Nods...*ok i can see your point, if UAC checks everything every time you start an elevated process (to be honest i have no idea whether it does or not) then i can see where your slowdown comes from, however, advising the user in the original thread to disable UAC and running as limited user only to avoid these slowdowns (which is what you were doing) seems to be a little pointless on that basis alone, (although i do agree with you that the safest way to run is limited user only, and "run as a seperate admin account" as needed) when i think it is unlikely that said user would be running as many processes as you are, you said yourself that your machine has a very heavy workload.
having said that, if UAC is checking everything every time (and even if it is it may well just be a bug in your particular setup) that sounds like a complete waste of processor clocks to me....
If only MS created Windows to just work with limited user by default, it'll probably easier to maintain high performance computing experience without the overhead of security checks. Here's my reason:
The proper way:
It wouldn't need any checking if you are by default restricted. BUT to convey this to Windows users, Microsoft should have locked down a lot of elements in Windows experience, which is bad - since the Windows usage model has always been single user, admin all the time. By locking things down, there are serious implications that will impede "Windows experience", Windows won't be windows anymore, it will work and feel like Linux/MacOS X - Which will alienate a lot of Windows users. But hey, progress are to be paid for.
The UAC way
You're able to keep on using admin account, and let the system limits your privilege. This is very "smooth" experience for normal Windows user. They will be safer in some cases and on light load, the performance will not degrade too much with all these UAC security checks. But this method still have downsides, many "normal" windows apps that doesn't practice Vista/7 "mode" will be either partially working, or not working at all because UAC is now forcing it's limiter to every processes that's using a "limited" user credentials. But to achieve such result, many checks must be made, many techniques employed to automagically limit a super user to look like a limited user. Generating tokens, making sure which token are used by every process - every single time when any process needs to access the system, creating Virtualization sandbox, Mandatory Integrity Checks, ASLR, DEP, and many more checks are to be run to process to ensure security. From a user standpoint, this is very "smooth" experience, "Wow, now windows checks these? I like it...". But the downside is, it's shouldn't need to be this complicated, it's wasting processing power, this. I care about how my computing power is used, if it doesn't impede my experience, I'd let it be - too bad it did...
Both wanted to achieve the same goal, to secure the system down. The proper way's limitation is quite severe if to be implemented (well, not really). Whenever you want to change a significantly important system settings, it will spit out a username/password dialog. The same as UAC, it dimmed the screen - asking for confirmation (OK, UAC is simpler since it only ask you, and you click one button, no typing information). UAC in it's infancy generated MANY user complaints just because of that little action... I thought if Microsoft just disable UAC, and did the proper way, I think it'd be even simpler, Way simpler. Some Linux distros came up with this: if an admin account is needed, the user can opt to save the admin credential JUST FOR THIS LOGIN SESSION ONLY, so the user won't be bothered to enter the credentials every time, just confirm that the credential is as typed, press "OK". But once you logged off or locked the screen, that credential record is erased, you need to enter it once more if met with a security checks.
I don't know, it's just me... I'm still amazed how Microsoft horribly missed this very very simple concept execution. Windows 7 is a great product, but we can always improve a great product, right?
zzz2496
The typical windows user seems very "overwhelmed" with the single ok mouse button click that they have to deal with today. If they had to provide a username and password every time, they would revolt.
I think MS made the right choice for their product and userbase....had they tried to force everybody into a limited account, everybody would circumvent by creating an admin account and would just use that. Thus, leaving the box as unsecure as it has always been. While not perfect, at least UAC is better than previous practices.
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Averaging 130 processes when working.